2001 Chateau Pavie - St. Emilion

Opened and served immediately. Vibrant saturated ruby/purple coloration. Full bodied but showing a wonderful suppleness and ease on the palate. A very forward ripe wine showing intense flavors of currants, black raspberries, minerals, roasted coffee and a wisp of creosote. A fun wine with no hard edges or imbalance, but obviously no super complexity at this point either. Any tannin is nearly completely hidden by the wealth of fruit. I would tend to place myself in the camp that this wine can sustain upwards of 20 years of cellering due to the sheer amount of fruit, but as ojeffso said in another thread "time will tell". 95 points.

No doubt about it, this is an excellent bottle of wine. It is showing remarkably well already and has the components to age.

As Seek has commented, the blast of well-balanced fruit and acidity shows a rather restrained, more powerfully elegant style of Pavie compared to the prior three vintages. Of all the Pavies I've had to date (98-01), this most closely resembles the 2000 and represents a relative bargain to it (at almost half the price).

A strong buy.

Right you are. The '01 Pave Decesse was drinking very well when I had it months ago. Very similar profile to the Pavie. My other bottles of the 01 Pavie Decesse are resting.

Haven't tried my '00 Pavie Decesse yet though. They will sleep for at least 10 years.

BTW - I bought my 2000 Pavie Decesse from Hi Time Wine Cellars (Costa Mesa, CA) for $93 (all in) and the 2001 from Chicago Wine Company for $69 (all in).

Chicago Wine Company, FYI, still advertises the 2001 for very good prices. And their delivery charge is quite fair (~$3-4/bottle).

That's a great price on the '00 Decesse. I've never seen it less than $99-100. The '01 I bought at Wine Exchange for $69.99, and I've even seen that price at Wally's occasionally when it's been on sale. I was very intrigued by Parker's comments on ebob a while back that in a blind tasting of '01s he participated in the '01 PD smoked everything else, including all the first growths (not surprising in some respects), in the opinion of virtually everyone at the tasting.