Not a good Christmas for wines, generally. For one reason and another we didn't end up drinking many interesting new wines - for the most part I fell back on old classics from the cellar. The new wines I did try were ...
2007 Marks & Spencer Trentino Nosiola
Smells gently of fragrant fields and citrus fruit, which is promising. But it falls apart completely on the palate - the dominant taste is sour lemon, backed up by an unpleasantly bitter tang of wormwood and the whole is almost like swallowing medicine. It improved a bit with a few hours air, but not a lot. 2/5
Chateau de la Jaubertie 2004 "Mirabelle" Red
A dark red wine that smells of rich coffee, bramble and spices. The bottle suggested it needed decanting for six hours and it wasn't lying - it took an hour before this was even approachable on the palate, tasting of little but dense tannin in the meantime. Once it did get enough air, this was something of a revelation - I'd been expecting a tannin-heavy wine but it is in fact very well balanced. A real riot of flavour too - coffee and liquorice, smoke and spice, plum, redcurrant and even some marzipan. Let down slightly by being on the watery side. 4/5