The 2005 Poyeux will vie with the 2010 as one of the greatest recent vintages of this great wine, and my gut instinct is that this will go down in history as one of the top handful of vintages of this wine in the entire history of the domaine! The wine is still quite youthful and demands at least another dozen years in the cellar before it will really reach its apogee, but it is so beautifully balanced that it is very easy today to see its future greatness. The bouquet is deep, pure and sappy, offering up a fine constellation of red and black cherries, cigar wrapper, a complex base of soil, tobacco leaf, gentle smokiness and a very discreet framing of vanillin oak. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied and sappy at the core, with great focus and grip, seamless balance and great nascent complexity already in evidence on the very, very long, suavely tannic and tangy finish. The bright acids of the 2005 vintage will make this extraordinary wine extremely long-lived. To my palate, this is the greatest young vintage of Poyeux I have ever tasted! 98+ - JG
JG98+March 2017
The 2005 Saumur-Champigny Les Poyeux – in half new and half one-wine barriques – offers an intense, high-toned nose of ripe blackberry and machine oil. Deep, rich and expansive on the palate, featuring stock-pot meatiness, ripe blackberry fruit, alluring, Chambertin-like rose petal inner-mouth florality, and subtly salty minerality, this should be worthy of a decade or more of bottle age. The mixture in the empty glass of rose, blackberry, black cherry, and elusive carnal and mineral nuances worthy of a great Pinot should alone prove worthy of what is bound to seem by local standards a hefty price. (DS) - WA
WA92August 2007