2019 Chateau Latour, Pauillac, Case of 6 btls

JD100 "Looking at the Grand Vin, the 2019 Château Latour is another perfect wine in the vintage and is as prodigious as they come. Revealing a deep purple hue, it displays a powerful and complex array of pure Pauillac cassis-like fruit as well as lead pencil, graphite, chalky minerality, truffle, and espresso and shows the vintage’s more elegant style perfectly, with nothing out of place. It is medium to full-bodied, with ripe, sweet tannins, but it still has that classic Latour regalness, concentration, structure, and class, with just a hint of its normal youthful austerity. This flawless balanced, structured, insanely good Latour will be drinkable in just 7-8 years but evolve for 40-50 years in cold cellars. Hats off to the team of technical director Hélène Génin and CEO Frédéric Engerer:

LP100 "Composed of 92.5% Cabernet Sauvignon and 7.5% Merlot, the 2019 Latour is deep garnet-purple in color. It comes barreling out of the glass with powerful notes of blackcurrant jelly, blackberry pie, and plum preserves, followed by suggestions of pencil shavings, cast-iron pan, and charcoal. The medium to full-bodied palate is exquisitely constructed with a myriad of very fine layers, supported by ripe, grainy tannins and beautiful tension, finishing epically long and mineral-laced. It's still very tightly wound and will require at least 5 to 7 more years in cellar, then should age gracefully for a good 50-years+." LPB for

DR100 Dark blackcurrants with smokey tobacco, liquorice and slate. Cool straight away, fresh but so perfectly mouthfilling, not sweet like 2020, this is more cooling and fresh, blue fruit, black cherry, fleshy like fruit skin texture. Dark, I love the 2019s because they're more controlled and serious but so nuanced. To me this is how a great Pauillac can taste, serious, deep, classic Cabernet markers, lots of minerality in the flint and stoney aspects, strong tannins and a powerful, muscular structure with minty sides. An amazing Pauillac, this is really my style. Still so full of concentration and life, this will last forever.

RP99+ "The 2019 Latour is a profound wine in the making, and it will surely emerge as one of the most long-lived wines of the vintage, as well as one of the greatest. Unwinding in the glass with scents of rich cassis fruit, English walnuts, cigar wrapper, black truffle, loamy soil and violets, it’s full-bodied, layered and muscular, with huge depth at the core, ripe tannins and lively acids, concluding with a long, seemingly interminable finish. Checking in at 14.1% alcohol, this prodigious Latour will require two decades to hit its stride, but it will be more than worth the wait." WK for TWA Apr 2022

William Kelley for RobertParker.com writes, "Under CEO Frédéric Engerer and technical director Hélène Génin, unremitting perfectionism and attention to detail is the order of the day at Château Latour, so it's no surprise that this great estate has delivered some of the finest wines of the vintage in Bordeaux. Certified organic since 2018, most of Latour's historic "Enclos" is being farmed biodynamically these days, and its entirety is now cultivated by horse to minimize soil compaction and preserve intact as many old vines as possible. But the objective, above all, rather than subscribing to any particular theoretical approach, is to treat the vineyard holistically, as a system, within and with nature rather than against it." Published: Apr 07, 2022