2024 La Mission Haut Brion

Red and black currants, cold fireplace, violets, and a beautiful tobacco and lead pencil quality all emerge from the 2024 Château La Mission Haut-Brion, a medium-bodied Pessac based on 51% Cabernet Sauvignon, 46.5% Merlot, and the rest Cabernet Franc. It's pretty and perfumed, with good intensity and a seamless, layered mouthfeel. The tannins are fine and integrated, giving it a graceful, approachable style that still holds to the classic La Mission profile. Compared to the more inward and structured Haut-Brion, this is more open-knit and front end-loaded. It should offer plenty of early appeal yet still have the class to evolve gracefully.

Deep garnet-purple colored. Needs a little patient swirling to bring out evocative scents of juicy black plums, fresh blackberries, and kirsch, plus nuances of lilac, star anise, and fragrant soil. The medium-bodied palate is satiny textured with great energy and freshness, delivering layers of blackberries and floral notes, finishing long and perfumed.

Notes of dark berries, spices, mulberries and discreet hints of new oak preface the 2024 La Mission Haut-Brion, a medium to full-bodied, dense and attractively seamless wine for the vintage, with a textural mid-palate that's underpinned by a firm chassis of tannins, concluding with a long, broad and rather ripe finish. Slightly austere at this stage, it is likely to flesh out with élevage, developing into a structured and serious La Mission with promising aging potential. Like its sibling Haut-Brion, the estate benefited from its intramural location in Pessac, which allowed for more complete ripening in a year that posed greater challenges for some other Pessac-Léognan properties.