Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes (Futures Pre-Sale) 2009

Professional Ratings

• 100 Wine Enthusiast
  The aromas are so rich and powerful, with great ripe apricots. There are honey, spice and beautiful sweet spiced pears. This is an extraordinary wine in an extraordinary year in Sauternes.
  Barrel Sample: 98-100 Points
• 100 James Suckling
  Showing so much tropical and exotic fruits like mangos, papayas, pears and hints of honey and ginger. This is intense. Full bodied and very sweet, with intense honey, and a long, long finish. A wild palate with an electrifying finish of spices, mint, and dried fruits. Great freshness on the finish, but with so much botrytis character as well.
  Barrel Sample: 99-100 Points
• 98 Wine Spectator
  Dense and unctuous, but with lacy detail already showing along the edges, as light toasty hazelnut and piecrust notes lead the way for creamed melon, mango and pineapple flavors, with hints of green plum and honeysuckle. There’s mouthwatering drive on the finish, which drips with a rosehip honey note that keeps pulling you back. Stunning. Best from 2020 through 2055.
• 98 Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
  The 2009 Yquem has an almost ethereal nose, beautifully defined with scents of honey, honeysuckle, pear, fresh apricot and a hint of quince. It blossoms in the glass, gaining intensity and expanding across the ether. The immediate impression is not of a powerful, rich, botrytis-laden Yquem, but one that has semblances with the 2007 in terms of poise and precision, the acidity defining the wine in its youth and around that, subtle notes of honey, fig, pear, apricot and just a hint of ginger adding vibrancy and edginess towards the pure and tensile finish. As expected, there is extraordinary persistency, lingering in the mouth long after the wine has disappeared, yet it will remain long in the memory.
  Barrel Sample: 96-98 Points
• 95 Decanter
  Voluptuous honeyed nose, with peach compote aromas and spicy oak. Has a fine attack, leaner and more precise than the nose suggests. It's minty and almost peppery, with dried apricot flavours, a wine of tremendous drive and discreet power.Decidedly sweet but well balanced and very long.