Winemaker Notes
Blend: 46% Cabernet Sauvignon, 43% Merlot, 11% Cabernet Franc
The Barrel Sample for this wine is above 14% ABV.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Blackberry, blackcurrant and wet-earth character with spice and sweet tobacco. Bark and cloves, too. It’s medium-bodied with fine-grained tannins and a long finish. Excellent second wine from Las Cases. Best with three to four years of bottle age, but try after 2024.
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Wine Enthusiast
Densely textured, this wine has lashings of black currant fruits to go with the open, spicy tannins. It has an almost jammy fruitiness, emphasizing the ripe Merlot in the blend. It's proper second wine, made to age over the medium term.
Barrel Sample: 92-94 -
Decanter
he grapes come from within the walled L'Enclos for this 2nd wine, and straight away you see a higher intensity and focus than with the more open Clos de Marquis. The majority Merlot gives a plump character to the ripe berry fruits but they are old vines with plenty of intensity. Great entry point to Las Cases, with lift and focus on the finish - you still get the austerity and tight tannic delivery that is part and parcel of the Las Cases experience, but there is juice and pleasure waiting here.
Barrel Sample: 93 -
Jeb Dunnuck
The second wine of the château, the 2019 Le Petit Lion is based on 46% Cabernet Sauvignon, 43% Merlot, and the rest Cabernet Franc that saw 30% new French oak. Beautiful cassis and black cherry fruits as well as cedar pencil, tobacco, and damp earth all emerge on the nose, and it's medium to full-bodied, has a balanced, seamless texture, wonderful depth of fruit, and a great finish. It's one heck of a second wine that will have two decades of prime drinking.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2019 Le Petit Lion is excellent, offering up nots of dark berries, plums, pencil shavings and loamy soil, followed by a medium to full-bodied, deep and lively palate that’s nicely concentrated, concluding with a long, saline finish. It’s produced from vines within the clos of Léoville-Las Cases itself—mainly young-vine Cabernet Sauvignon and old-vine, less optimally exposed Merlot in a block that borders Latour.
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Wine Spectator
Sleek and tightly focused, with an iron spine taking up as much space as the cassis, cherry puree and violet notes that form the core. The racy finish has an alluring austerity. Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc. Best from 2023.
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.