Château Léoville Las Cases 2017

One of the very few wines in this vintage that truly stains the glass with its wonderfully vibrant anthocyanins. This is an exceptional wine - Léoville just knows how to knock it out of the park again and again. An early vintage meant everything was blended and in barrels before Christmas, with 7.5% press wine, so this has had some time to settle down already. There's huge persistence through the palate, very similar to last year. It has presence and a grip that doesn't want to let go, and you don't want it to either. It continues to reveal itself over the course of the glass, showing slate, cassis, blackberry and charcoal. It's not as powerfully knitted as the 2016, but watch out for those tannins. I expect this will be a wine that, like the 1996 and 2016, will close down and evolve extremely slowly. Stunning aromatics. 90% new oak. 3.72pH. Drinking Window 2027 - 2042

Purplish purple. Intense, deep bouquet, marked by notes of licorice wood, black berries such as blackcurrant and blackberries. Touch of beetroot. What a superb olfactory expression and what depth. Dense, compact and fruity attack. Firstly, we think that the wine does not have the necessary material to manage the olfactory intensity and all that follows, and then we find ourselves faced with a powerful and persistent tannic expression which reveals itself slowly and which gains in dimension as the palate progresses. A fruity, racy, spicy and complex wine. A very great success. 2023–2042

This is very muscular with formed and bright tannins that give the wine super drive and length. The tannins build on the finish with a lovely integration of black fruits. Serious about vintage.

This has the vintage's fresh acidity, which does a wonderful job of driving the core of blueberry, black currant and blackberry fruit along. Light anise and graphite accents lend typicity, with a sleek mineral edge on the finish. Rock solid. –JM