2009 Château Margaux, Margaux, Bordeaux

1.5% Cabernet Franc completes the blend.

A winning combination of power and elegance here, showcasing the concentration of the year in the full, ripe and muscular fruit and tannins balanced by racy acidity and supreme tension making this a wonderful wine to taste and drink. It's ample and generous, giving tons of flavour nuance - black berry fruits, subtle sweet spice, cocoa powder and graphite as well as textural interest. It also has excellent markers of terroir in the mineral salinity that lingers on the finish. You get a sense of hidden strength here too, there's depth and layering but also a grace to the overall frame with a juiciness that is so joyful. Energetic, lively and expressive and all very harmonious. What a wine.

Drink 2022 - 2055

100% new oak. 31% of production won the 1st wine, with the same high level of Cabernet Sauvignon as in 2005. Paul Pontallier director in these years, and this continues to set out a benchmark for the property, as it has every time I have tasted it.

Power and enveloping aromatics from the first moment, this is bursting with pleasure, and so signature Margaux. Impossible not to love the depth and the spice that comes through from the first moment, with spirals of sandalwood, violets, crushed raspberries and cassis. Enticing generous, and totally delicious. Still young, very much in its primary fruit phase, but you can begin to drink this now, such is the vibrancy of the tannins, but it will deliver for many decades to come. Torreified, smoked coffee bean and campfire notes overtake after half an hour in the glass.

Drink 2022 - 2050

Tasted blind. Dark lustrous crimson. Spicy note and very ripe fruit with some leafiness. Thick and sweet – very rich and fat. Very dramatic. Group average placed this second favourite of the 2009s.

Drink 2020 - 2055

Tasted blind at Farr Vintners’ 2009 Bordeaux tasting.

The 2009 Château Margaux is intense and powerful on the nose with blackberry, forest floor, graphite and rose petals that unfurl with aeration. The palate is medium-bodied with fine grain tannin, impressive density and plenty of freshness, perhaps more than the 2009 Mouton-Rothschild. There is a genuine Pauillac-like drive to this Château Margaux thanks to the Cabernet Sauvignon, clearly a First Growth destined for long-term ageing. 13.1% alcohol.

Drink 2023 - 2070

A blend of 87% Cabernet Sauvignon, 9% Merlot, 2% Cabernet Franc and 2% Petit Verdot; pH 3.79; 13.3% alcohol; represents a stringent 36% selection. 

Good full ruby-red. Pure, ripe aromas of cassis, graphite and cedar, lifted by floral and mineral high notes. Dense and amazingly concentrated yet light on its feet, with compelling, extremely pure flavours of spicy blackcurrant, tobacco leaf and minerals. The extremely long, slow-building and wonderfully fine-grained finish offers an exhilarating combination of power and sweetness. This comes across as quite backward today yet is anything but austere. A real essence of Margaux's great terroir, and one of my favourite wines of the vintage. 

As I walked to the parking lot with Pontallier after the tasting, he said to me, "If people don't think this is one of the greatest wines I have ever made, then it means I haven't really understood anything in the last 30 years spent making wine."

The 2009 Château Margaux is deep garnet in colour and features wonderfully fragrant minted cassis, lilacs, Black Forest cake and oolong tea scents with touches of pencil shavings and dusty soil. Medium to full-bodied, it has a firm, grainy frame with lovely freshness lifting the perfumed fruit to a very long, mineral-laced finish.

Drink 2020 - 2050

A brilliant offering from the Mentzelopoulos family, once again their gifted manager, Paul Pontallier, has produced an uncommonly concentrated, powerful 2009 Chateau Margaux made from 87% Cabernet Sauvignon and the rest primarily Merlot with small amounts of Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. As with most Medocs, the alcohol here is actually lower a modest 13.3%) than most of its siblings. 

Abundant blueberry, cassis and acacia flowers as well as hints of charcoal and forest floor aromas that are almost Burgundian in their complexity are followed by a wine displaying sweet, well-integrated tannins as well as a certain ethereal lightness despite the wine's overall size. Rich, round, generous and unusually approachable for such a young Margaux, this 2009 should drink well for 30-35+ years.

Drink 2012 - 2047

This marathon runner is currently in the no-man's land between youthful vitality and mellow maturity. There's a very serious tannin structure here, but it needs a lot longer to fully resolve. Very tight and closed. A perfect wine usually. But not today.

Try in 2020