CONDITION:* Excellent

NOTES:   Mouton's 1993 has turned out exceptionally well. The color is a healthy, brilliant purple, and the wine's aromatic personality borders on ostentatious, with its display of cassis fruit, minerals, lead pencil, Asian spices, caramel, vanilla, and toasty oak. Spicy, with great purity of fruit, this medium-bodied wine exhibits fine density, an attractive inner core of ripeness and extraction, and a moderately tannic, surprisingly long finish. Tasted side by side against the tannic, stern, tough as nails 1990, this is to be the better wine, although Mouton's raw materials in 1990 must have been significantly superior to those in 1993. Given the high percentage of Cabernet Sauvignon (84%), the 1993 will firm up and close, but there is plenty of sweet fruit in this unquestionably successful wine.

(RP) 90 pts.