2014 Château Latour Grand Vin

The 2014 Latour is a vintage that I have enjoyed a few times. Now at ten years old, it has a very intense and, for Latour, quite an opulent bouquet that is stylistically more akin to Mouton than Lafite-Rothschild: cigar smoke, black truffles and mint emerge with aeration. The palate is medium-bodied with saturated tannins. This is a multi-layered Pauillac dispensing with some of the strictness it showed in its infancy. Very focused, with traces of tobacco and graphite towards the finish, this is a seriously fine Latour that should age gracefully in bottle. Tasted blind at the Southwold 10-Year-On tasting.

Tasted blind. Deep, youthful garnet. Rich dark fruit, fragrant even though it is ripe, suggestion of cigar-box spice. Really fine tannins, beautifully dry but not drying. Extreme elegance. Refined power, the layered, paper-fine tannins still resolving. (JH)

Gunsmoke, grilled cassis, slate, liqourice bud, lavender, espresso, muscular and still very young, plenty of coiled power here, autumnal fruit that is ripe but not over-exuberant. A ton of appellation typicity, Latour always manages to deliver concentration and focus, and one year on from my last tasting (at the time of the wine's first release) this hovers on the edge of opening up but has many more layers to uncover. Love the gentle grip that slows down and draws out the finish. Eric Boissenot consultant, Hélène Génin technical director. Harvest September 18 September to October 15.