2010 Chateau Latour 1996 Latour Two Legendary Wines Tasted

Chateau Latour

Chateau Latour is now incredibly expensive. The current vintage offered for sale is selling for more than $1,000 per bottle! Is it worth it? That depends on a combination of your sense of value coupled with your level of available disposable income. Putting price aside, the wine is stunning! 2010 Chateau Latour is another reference point vintage for the chateau.
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2010 Latour Completely opaque in color, this stunning Chateau Latour is filled with scents of, licorice, blackberry liqueur, Asian spice, oak and gravel. The wine is packed with layers of concentrated, fresh, pure dark fruits, sweet cassis, spice, blackberries and dark, bitter chocolate. This wine ends with a sensation of your palate drenched in waves of perfectly ripe, dark berries. Everything is in balance and harmony. This is a seamless tasting experience. Produced from only 36% of the harvest, the wine is a blend of 90.5% Cabernet Sauvignon, 8.5% Merlot and equal parts Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot, the wine reached 14.4%. There is no sensation of heat in the majestic vintage of Latour. Over the years, this will be seen as another reference point vintage of Chateau Latour. 99-100 Pts
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2010 Les Forts de Latour – Deep ruby in color, the wine opens with an earthy spicy, mineral driven nose. With round tannins, supple textures and a long creamy crème de cassis filled finish, this is very much in a Pauillac style of Bordeaux wine. 91-93 Pts
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2010 Pauillac de Latour – With spicy blackberry scents and soft, round textures, the wine ends with a light chocolate covered blackberry finish. 90-92 Pts
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At the same tasting, I was afforded the opportunity to look back at the first stunning vintage produced at the estate after Frederic Engerer began managing the property. Latour is one of the world’s longest lived wines. In the best vintages, the wines can last as well as improve for 100 years or more! When Bordeaux wines have the ability to last that long, they also need decades or more of bottle age, before they begin to display their qualities. That is part of the reason for tasting vintages along the way. They let you know how they are doing and offer you a glimpse into what you can expect from current vintages of similar quality. With that in mind, I jumped at the chance to taste the famed 1996.

Chateau Latour 1996 Bordeaux Pauillac Tasting

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1996 Latour offers a complicated nose of truffle, licorice, tobacco, cassis, cloves, cinnamon, cocoa, cigar box, cedar chest, black plums and ash. The perfume gains additional layers of fragrances with each swirl and sniff. This Bordeaux wine is perfectly balanced, harmonious and intense. Full-bodied, rich and concentrated with pure dark, spicy fruits, this is easily described as power blended with elegance. The seamless finish ends with countless waves of ripe, cassis, spice and blackberry. While already approachable, this stunning wine will continue evolving and improving for decades. Sonia from Latour made the perfect comment about the wine saying, “The 96 Latour speaks to you for hours, meaning the wine develops well in the glass and continues offering new aromatics with each breath you take of the perfume.” She was right. 99 Pts

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