This great bottle of rosé was the debut wine for my birthday celebrations on Sunday night at Shanghai Lo restaurant in Hong Kong. I've always been a huge fan of DP rosé. It's rich and intense but never heavy and cloying like so many rose Champagnes. I was surprised how fresh and balanced the 2000 DP rosé still is considering the warm and sunny weather during the growing season. Hot and sunny years are seldom great years for Champagne. Yet this bottle is superb with creamy-textured sliced peaches, cranberries, petals and apples on the nose and palate. It was full-bodied with a enrapturing texture and an intense, flavorful finish.

The 2000 Dom Perignon Rose is a flashy, ripe Champagne that screams Pinot to a degree I have never encountered in another vintage of this wine. A dark, intense color leads to a Chambolle-like nose followed by endless red berries, flowers and spices, all backed up with plenty of muscle, richness and density. The wine continues to blossom on the palate, with utterly beguiling detail, clarity and polish, all qualities that resonate on the rich, expansive finish. The 2000 Dom Perignon Rose is 45% Chardonnay and 55% Pinot Noir, of which 25% is still Pinot. Geoffroy says his goal was to make a statement with the 2000 Dom Perignon Rose; he has done that?and so much more. In fact, the 2000 seems to signal a stylistic shift towards a more important, serious style of rose. This superb wine is not to be missed, but readers should note this is no easygoing rose, rather it is a Champagne that demands serious attention. The 2000 will test the limits of what readers expect from a Dom Perignon Rose, but the wine is simply marvelous. I loved it. This bottle was disgorged in 2008.

The 2000 Dom Pérignon Rosé is just starting to enter its first plateau of maturity. Sweet tobacco, mint, dried flowers, rose petal, game, licorice and tobacco add myriad shades of aromatic nuance. This is the first vintage in which former Chef de Caves Richard Geoffroy started bumping up the percentage of still Pinot in his quest to make a more vinous Rosé. Naturally, some of the sheer intensity the 2000 showed as a young wine has faded. More importantly, I find the 2000 in a transitional phase where it is settling into the next stage of its life. For that reason, I would prefer to cellar it for at least a few years. -- Antonio Galloni

I haven't always been knocked out by this cuvée but such is not the case with the 2000 as there is fine complexity to the beautifully well-layered nose that speaks of various red berry fruit elements along with floral, yeast and discreet lemon zest nuances. One of the aspects that I very much like is how full-flavored this is while retaining a lovely sense of refinement that is substantially aided by the notably fine effervescence, all wrapped in an utterly delicious and impressively persistent finish. Sometimes rosé champagnes struggle with the balancing act of delivering first-rate flavor authority while maintaining a refined mouth feel. When they miss they are either too tannic and thus err on the side of rusticity to they're too light and thus don't provide the depth one searches for at this level. However the 2000 Dom Rosé gets the balance exactly right because as noted there is both excellent depth and superb refinement. For my taste this has arrived at its peak but note that it will certainly hold for years to come.

The 2000 Dom Perignon Rosé is a beautiful wine that is cut very much in the vinous and almost Burgundian style that I always find with this great wine. The utterly stunning nose soars from the glass in a constellation of dried cherries, orange zest, woodsmoke, chalky minerality, rye toast and a gentle touch of meatiness that I often find in this bottling. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied and very complex, with great mid-palate intensity, elegant mousse, a wide open personality, sound, framing acids and exceptional length and grip on the focused and very classy finish. The more gentle acidity here in the 2000 Dom Perignon Rosé strongly suggests that this is a vintage for more near-term drinking (though the balance is impeccable and the wine may cruise along like this for many more years to come), and my gut feeling is that this is not a vintage of Dom Rosé that will make old bones. But, for drinking over the next several years, it will be splendid.