What a wonderful wine … released earlier this year, during the New Vintages festival, when Mountain Road releases a plethora of wine from the great 2002 vintage – and most of them will age very well right into the next decade. This Franc is stunning, especially for the price. Currently the nose is loaded with green pepper, black pepper, tons of black fruit and oak. The taste is a little bit closed, showing signs of spicy black pepper, oak and a tannin grip that should loosen with more bottle aging. One of my co-tasters came out with the following “damn good wine now, but it’s gonna be even better later”. I would probably have used a more flowery or descriptive vocabulary but I couldn’t agree more. Buy a few bottles of this beauty now and lay them down, then start trying them in 3-4 years. Then again, you might want to give yourself a starting point for comparison, open one now, make some notes, then open another in a year from now … and then the following year … and then the next, and so on. Or, if you like it just the way it is now – drink up. By the way – for you romantics out there, the intense reddish-purple colour of this wine is also a great selling point and looks great in candlelight.