2009 Château Latour, Pauillac, Bordeaux

An incredible wine in every way, the 2009 Château Latour displays the ripe, sexy vintage style while still offering classic Latour power, density, and regalness. Currants, spicy wood, smoked tobacco, graphite, and ample minerality all define the bouquet, and it's full-bodied, with incredible density, perfectly integrated, ripe, polished tannins, and a finish that leaves no doubt about the insane quality of this wine.

Based on 91.3% Cabernet Sauvignon and 8.7% Merlot, and checking in at 13.7% alcohol, it's drinking brilliantly today, given its incredible texture and balance, and I suspect it has another 50-60 years of prime drinking. This is as good a Bordeaux as I've had and is as good as wine gets.

Drink 2022 - 2082

Dark and chocolatey with a lot of richness, but also a cool herbal freshness this is a very impressive Medoc wine that's already delicious to drink. Very long, surprisingly supple finish for this château. It's a perfect wine.

Drink or hold

The 2009 Latour is endowed with a simply magnificent nose with intense blackberry and cassis fruit laced with minerals and graphite, extremely focused to the point of overwhelming the sense. Wow. The palate is medium-bodied with filigree tannin, multilayered black fruit infused with crushed stone and a hint of white pepper, though it clams up towards the finish as if to say, not yet. Outstanding. This is Latour firing on all cylinders.

Drink 2032 - 2070

A blend of 91.3% Cabernet Sauvignon and 8.7% Merlot with just under 14% natural alcohol, the 2009 Latour is basically a clone of the super 2003, only more structured and potentially more massive and long lived. An elixir of momentous proportions, it boasts a dense purple colour and an extraordinarily flamboyant bouquet of black fruits, graphite, crushed rocks, subtle oak and a notion of wet steel.

It hits the palate with a thundering concoction of thick, juicy blue and black fruits, lead pencil shavings and a chalky minerality. Full-bodied but very fresh with a finish that lasts over a minute, this is one of the most remarkable young wines I have ever tasted. Will it last one hundred years? No doubt about it. Can it be drunk in a decade? For sure.

Drink 2022 - 2080

Deep garnet coloured, the 2009 Latour is unashamedly youthful with bold blackcurrants, black cherries and warm plums notes plus nuances of cedar chest, aniseed, beef drippings, truffles and tapenade with a waft of tilled black soil. Full, concentrated and powerful in the mouth, it has a rock-solid frame of super ripe, grainy tannins and fantastic freshness, finishing very long and wonderfully minerally. Just a baby—this needs time!

Drink 2022 - 2080

As usual, this is a notably backward wine but shows huge potential. Complex, saline, mineral nose. Very dry as opposed to sweet. Not very typical of this extremely ripe vintage but admirable even if far from ready. The most youthful wine in this tasting.

Drink 2026 - 2050

A 91/9 blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot; 13.7% alcohol; 87 IPT; roughly 38% of the total crop.

Purple ruby. Flamboyant red cherry, cassis, graphite and cedar aromas soar from the glass. Then, it is very dense, supple, and smooth, with a noble texture and great breadth to its red cherry, blackcurrant, spicy plum, ink, and cedar flavours. Finishes with exceptionally velvety tannins and a very ripe, almost perfumed quality to the red and black fruit flavours.

It is a large-scale and great wine that calls to mind a combination of the 1982 and 2005 Latours. That said, while this wine shares some of the 2009 Mouton's voluptuous perfume, it lacks the extraordinary finesse of the 2009 Lafite or Margaux but is much more powerful than both. Millionaires will have much fun comparing the first growths of 2009 and arguing over which is the best.

The hot, dry summer of 2009 produced a somewhat burly wine that seems riper and almost sweeter than the 2010 vintage, although it lacks a bit of the tension and freshness of the 2010. The result is fleshy and dense, with an almost fearsome depth of flavour. The texture suggests that this wine has the substance to age for decades, while the approachable character means that it should open up before the 2010 vintage. In 2009, the picking lasted from 23rd September through to 10th October, and the final blend was over 90% Cabernet Sauvignon, with the balance being Merlot; neither Cabernet Franc nor Petit Verdot made an appearance in the grand vin.

Drink 2032 - 2082

Ideal with a 3-hour carafe.

Classic Pauillac power and finesse, packed with brambled fruits, hedgerow earthiness, exuberant while being controlled and carefully delivered. This has shoulders and backbone, and is impossible to ignore. Still in its primary phase so zero need to rush, but you are going to get more joy from this 2009 than you will with the 2010 vintage for at least the next five years. 100% new oak. Although they had not begun conversion at this point, things were moving in that direction - horses had been reintroduced within the vineyard as of 2008, and all chemical weedkillers had been stopped in the 1990s. The first biodynamic experiments took place in this vintage, but just over 3ha of vines.

Drink 2021 - 2046