The 1982 Pape Clément has never had a great reputation, but I like this wine very much and find that it is far better than what most people believe. I last tasted a bottle of the 1982 here when I wrote my historical feature on the estate back in 2012, and that particular bottle had been purchased at auction in California and shipped to me back in New York only a couple of months prior to my including it in the article. This most recent bottle was purchased at the same time, but benefited from having slumbered in my cellar an additional eight years, and it is now quite clear that I should have let the last bottle also fully recover from its cross-continental journey! This bottle was excellent, with signature complexity on both the nose and palate, but perhaps not quite the mid-palate plumpness of the very top echelon of 1982s. The bouquet wafts from the glass in a gorgeous blend of black cherries, cassis, tobacco leaf, walnut, complex, gravelly soil tones, cigar smoke and a wonderful, almost exotic topnote of salty minerality. On the palate the wine is pure, full-bodied and very complex, with just a wisp of fluidité at the core, but excellent focus and grip. The finish is long and classy, the balance here is impeccable, the tannins are melting away and the wine is really showing a step up in quality from the bottle I opened a few years back. This is clearly a sleeper of the vintage, particularly if you value complexity and elegance in your mature claret.