We've been holding on to this one for a couple of years and had an excellent opportunity to open it last night with steak, yams and pearl onions, and a salad of green beans and roasted tomatoes. This was an absolutely beautiful bottle of wine, which I received as a gift from the domaine in 2007 after purchasing two cases of the 2001. The 2001 was a standby for us for more than a year (and is delicious ... only one bottle left!), but the domaine had told me the 2002 was almost entirely prebought by private interests and restaurants. I see why now, although I'm not sure how the buyers in 2004 could have been sure that the vintage would turn out as well as it did. This bottle, with its cork still very clean (Beck has had some trouble with the corks from the 2001 vintage) poured a dark burgundy colour with slightly paler edges and put up a nose of raspberry and cream and cassis. Still quite fruit forward, the wine was wide open, with its tannins fully resolved, and it tasted of stewed fruits, tobacco, and dark, ripe berries. Apart from having a slightly too-thin mouth feel (the bouquet and the taste promised a more liquorous wine) this was a brilliant bottle, from an underappreciated AOC, the Costieres de Nimes.
I should add we started the night with a 2005 Domaine de Ravanès Graviers du Taureau, from an hors AOC domaine outside of Beziers. The 2002 vintage of this wine beat the 2002 Petrus in a blind taste testing three years ago, but the 2005 Gravieres is still not ready to drink: tight, miserly, packed with fruit, but still backwards. After a few hours it opened up even more, but it's going to be three years before I open another.