Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
A dense, beautifully structured wine. It shows intense, ripe fruit with balanced acidity. It’s the fine tannins that give it such class, surrounding the fruit, promising long aging. This is a classic for Léoville-Barton. Cellar Selection.
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James Suckling
What a nose! Chocolate, berry, meat and spice aromas. Full body, with soft and velvety tannins and a long, long finish. This is solid and rich for the vintage. A beauty.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Typically extracted and powerful (which is atypical in a vintage such as 2008), this offering may lack charm, but it is “locked and loaded” with plenty of background oak, huge black cherry and black currant fruit, medium to full body and a boatload of tannin. Forget it for 8-10 years and drink it over the following three decades.
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Connoisseurs' Guide
Very much like its close cousin from Langoa Barton, this a big, beefy, well-extracted wine that comes with no small measure of chalky astringency, but it is deeper in fruit with strong themes of sweet, well-ripened blackcurrants surviving the tannins that presently hold sway. It is not and will not be for some time one that will invite drinking, but it has the look of a classic west-side claret that should shine some ten to twelve years hence. It is a better choice than Langoa Barton.Reviewed: March 2011
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Wine Spectator
Alluring, with warm fig sauce, plum and currant paste notes liberally laced with espresso bean and dark roasted vanilla bean notes. Fleshy but focused, with the roasted edge adding definition and length.
One of the world’s most classic and popular styles of red wine, Bordeaux-inspired blends have spread from their homeland in France to nearly every corner of the New World. Typically based on either Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot and supported by Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot, the best of these are densely hued, fragrant, full of fruit and boast a structure that begs for cellar time. Somm Secret—Blends from Bordeaux are generally earthier compared to those from the New World, which tend to be fruit-dominant.
An icon of balance and tradition, St. Julien boasts the highest proportion of classed growths in the Médoc. What it lacks in any first growths, it makes up in the rest: five amazing second growth chateaux, two superb third growths and four well-reputed fourth growths. While the actual class rankings set in 1855 (first, second, and so on the fifth) today do not necessarily indicate a score of quality, the classification system is important to understand in the context of Bordeaux history. Today rivalry among the classed chateaux only serves to elevate the appellation overall.
One of its best historically, the estate of Leoville, was the largest in the Médoc in the 18th century, before it was divided into the three second growths known today as Chateau Léoville-Las-Cases, Léoville-Poyferré and Léoville-Barton. Located in the north section, these are stone’s throw from Chateau Latour in Pauillac and share much in common with that well-esteemed estate.
The relatively homogeneous gravelly and rocky top soil on top of clay-limestone subsoil is broken only by a narrow strip of bank on either side of the “jalle,” or stream, that bisects the zone and flows into the Gironde.
St. Julien wines are for those wanting subtlety, balance and consistency in their Bordeaux. Rewarding and persistent, the best among these Bordeaux Blends are full of blueberry, blackberry, cassis, plum, tobacco and licorice. They are intense and complex and finish with fine, velvety tannins.