1995 | Chateau la Mission Haut Brion

Subtle aromas of sweet tobacco, cigar box and ripe strawberry. Full-bodied, with very well-integrated, tightly woven tannins.

Reviews:

• Wine Advocate: This vintage is aging at a glacial pace and the tannins are currently more significant than their counterbalancing components of fruit and glycerin. While the word “potential” seems to be the most positive descriptor for this vintage, there are some nagging doubts about whether all the tannins will melt away and the fruit will hold. As in most 1995s, the color remains a healthy dark plum/purple. One of the bigger wines of the vintage, the ripe, powerful Merlot component has buttressed the Cabernet elements, giving the wine plenty of body, tannin and La Mission’s classic asphalt, cassis, blackberry, smoky barbecue, meaty notes intermixed with a hint of hot rocks.

• John Gilman: It had been fifteen years since I last tasted the 1995 La Mission, but a friend generously offered to pop a bottle for me when I told him that I was working on this article. The wine is still young (not surprisingly), but is just brimming with promise and really does start to blossom a bit with some extended aeration. The bouquet is deep and utterly classic in its constellation of dark berries, singed tobacco, complex, dark soil tones, tobacco leaf, smoke, a touch of mint and a very discreet base of nutty new oak. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied and nascently complex, with a rock solid core, great focus and grip, ripe, seamless tannins and outstanding length and grip on the very pure and classy finish. All this excellent vintage of La Mission needs is a bit more time in the cellar to soften up a bit more.

Producer Information

Château La Mission Haut-Brion is an estate in the Pessac-Léognan appellation in the northern Graves, a few miles southwest of Bordeaux's city center. Its near-neighbor and sister estate Château Haut-Brion was the only estate from the region featured in the 1855 Bordeaux Classification, but La Mission Haut-Brion (rated a Graves Grand Cru in the 1959 rankings) is often judged and priced as the equal of Haut-Brion and the other first growths. The wine is particularly known for its fruit intensity, rounded, generous texture and silky tannins, and has received multiple 100-point ratings from American critic Robert Parker. La Mission Haut-Brion sees 18-22 months aging in barrel, with 80 percent new oak. Between 6000 and 7000 cases are produced each year. La Chapelle de La Mission Haut-Brion has been the second wine since 2006, when it replaced Château La Tour Haut-Brion. The estate also produces two Semillon-based white wines: La Mission Haut-Brion Blanc (formerly Laville Haut-Brion) and, since 2009, La Clarté de Haut-Brion. The latter acts as a combined second wine for La Mission Haut-Brion and Haut-Brion Blanc. The estate takes its name from the Lazarite missionaries who owned it from 1682 until the French Revolution. It has been owned since 1983 by Domaine Clarence Dillon, the owner of Haut-Brion.

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