Vinous - Score: 97 (2020 July)

The 1961 Petrus is a wine that I have been fortunate to taste once before, albeit from bottle rather than the magnum here. What a brilliant wine. It has an astonishing bouquet that as a fellow attendee remarked, could easily be mistaken for a Californian Merlot of similar age. It offers quite precocious scents of mulberry, crushed strawberry and veins of blue fruit, almost Burgundian in style with stunning definition. The palate continues in the same theme: perfectly balanced with rounded tannin, great depth and smoothness, layers of red and black fruit intermingling with black truffle and mint. Maybe there is a little softness towards the finish and perhaps it does not have the persistence of the 1964, but it is an utterly divine Petrus that as banal as it reads, it is simply delicious to drink. Tasted at the Petrus dinner at Hide restaurant in London.