A la vôtre!

Shared a bottle of Nuits St Georges the other day, as modest a tipple as one would expect for £6.99; tentative, I suppose one would call it. I wonder how it would compare with one of the great ones from this region, a 1964 premier cru which an importer described at that time as:
Deep, untidy and a big shaggy nose. Rather a jumbly, untidy sort of wine, with fruitiness shooting off one way, firmness another, and body pushing about underneath. It will be as comfortable and comforting as the 1961 Nuits St Georges when it has pulled its ends in and settled down.

It will have pulled its ends in much too far by now, one fears.

This kind of description is useful for defending vice as well as to extolling virtue. Stephen Potter, inventor of Lifemanship, once promoted a Cockburn ’97 which was clearly past its best. He spoke of:
…the imperial decay of the invalid port…its gracious withdrawal from perfection…keeping a hint of former majesty, withal... whilst it hovered between oblivion and the divine Untergang of infinite recession…