1996 | Chateau Latour | Pauillac

Saturated ruby-red. Dark berries, violet, licorice and a note of torrefaction. Explosive, pure flavors are almost too big for the mouth. Finishes with big, sweet tannins and expanding, exhilarating flavors of pruneaux and crystallized dark berries. Perfectly integrated oak.

Reviews:

• Wine Advocate: The 1996 Latour is medium to deep garnet in color with a profound earthy, meaty, gamey nose with hints of blueberry preserves, crème de cassis and pencil shavings. The palate is full-bodied, concentrated and packed with muscular fruit, with a firm, ripe, grainy backbone and epically long finish. Showing much more youthfully than the 2000 tasted on the same day and still possessing bags of youthful fruit in the mid-palate, this beauty is going to go on and on!

• Decanter: Inky black even at 25 years old. A hugely impressive wine, with plenty of chewy tannins still in play, ripples of cassis, bilberry and blackberry fruits, set against olive paste, charcoal and eucalyptus. Things have softened around the edges no question, this is still full of life with decades ahead of it, but this is a great moment to start enjoying its promise. Textbook Latour in many ways, for its austerity and power, and its serious character that is underlaid by concentrated pleasure showcasing 'the gift of sub-gravel clays'.

Producer Information

Château Latour is one of Bordeaux's – and the world's – most famous wine producers. It is situated in the southeast corner of the Pauillac commune on the border of Saint-Julien, in the Médoc region. Rated as a First Growth in the 1855 Bordeaux Classification, it has become one of the most sought-after and expensive wine producers on the planet, and produces powerfully structured Cabernet Sauvignon-dominant wines capable of lasting many decades. The site has been occupied since 1331, with a fort and garrison to guard the estuary. Several smallholdings began to grow vines, and wine from the site gained recognition from Montaigne as early as the 16th Century. The original tower no longer exists; the famous tower featured on the label was designed as a pigeon roost and built around 1620. Latour's development as a single property came with the beginning of a long unbroken period of connected family ownership, based around the de Ségur name, also associated with Mouton and Calon-Ségur. This began in 1670 and lasted 290 years although, after the French Revolution, Latour was divided up and not fully reunited until 1841. The château has been owned by French billionaire François Pinault since 1993 and falls under the umbrella of his holding company, Groupe Artemis. Other notable Artemis possessions include the likes of Burgundy's Le Clos de Tart (in Morey-Saint-Denis) and Domaine d'Eugénie (in Vosne-Romanée), Château-Grillet in Condrieu, and Napa Valley's Araujo Estate.Typically for the region, Cabernet Sauvignon dominates in the vineyard, accounting for around 80 percent of plantings. Merlot makes up most of the remainder, and there are also small amounts of Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot.

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