Allen Meadows - Score: 94-97 (2022 January)

A restrained, elegant and wonderfully fresh nose speaks of a beautiful array of spice and floral elements on the mix of both red and dark fruit, exotic tea and a whiff of oak toast scents. There is excellent energy to the well-detailed and powerful broad-shouldered flavors that brim with sappy dry extract that helps to buffer the markedly firm but not rigid tannic spine shaping the driving, balanced and hugely long finish. This youthfully austere and decidedly backward effort is a classic Richebourg of class and grace but also one that is very much built to repay several decades of keeping.