2011 Château Lafleur

Community Tasting Notes (11) Avg Score: 93.7 points

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  1/29/2024 - Montesquieu Likes this wine: 94 Points

  La Vie du Vin featuring Ch. Lafleur and Martine's Wines (Blackberry Farm, TN): Spring drought conditions. Whiff of latex tube, which I didn't find offputting. Drinking well now with long life ahead.

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  12/27/2023 - Beeck10 wrote: 96 Points

  Wow, in the nose there's a bomb of cherry, sweet, red fruit, sultry yet earthy flavors. Blindly, you wouldn't guess it's from 2011; you'd think of a very warm year with a cooler month of September. It's not that it turns to jam. In the mouth, it matches the nose in stature, a beautiful balance of power and it keeps building up. You find the sweetness of cherry that you also have in the nose. This wine will improve even more!

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  8/27/2023 - NMIZ Likes this wine: 96 Points

  53% Cabernet Franc and 47% Merlot. Bright ruby-garnet. Opened up after 3 hours of decanting. Much better after 5 hours. Pronounced aroma. Smooth, complex and concentrated. Very long finish, lasting more than a minute. Elegant, perfumed, multilayer and dimensional. Expansive in the palate and weight on the tongue. Still very young with primary fruit flavours taking centre stage - red and black fruits. Strawberry and dark cherry. Presence of vanilla, cocoa, forest floor, pencil shaving, graphite, wet stone, violets, white pepper, leather and wet leaves. 96+. I expect the wine to improve as it matures. Still a baby.

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  11/20/2022 - Costes76 Likes this wine: 94 Points

  Dark ruby color. Reticent on nose, slowly opening up to ambient ripe dark fruits, cedar, chocolate. Dry, soft acidity, integrated tannins. Full bodied, elegant balance and structure, medium long finish. An elegant and textured wine, but missing that extra oomph.

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  5/15/2022 - Cailles wrote: 93 Points

  6 Vintages Le Pin vs Petrus vs Lafleur vs Other Pomerol: All wines tasted single blind, not decanted. Served in 6 vintage flights with a alternating 4th Pomerol added to every flight. A few observations: 1) Le Pin handily won this tasting, for me (4 out of 6 vintages at 96/97 pts) and the consensus. Made in a charming way, with loads of perfectly integrated, luxurious oak-derived notes, this wines drink well young and works very well in a larger tasting like this were you can’t follow the wines over an evening. Complex, round, intense, sexy yet elegant. 2) Lafleur came in second, despite mostly only hinting at its potential with very high complexity, it’s wonderful, typical herbal and earthy notes, all embedded in an impeccable, light structural frame. But they need time. 3) Most vintages of Petrus underperformed tonight (all below 95 pts). They would have needed more time to open up and come together. 4) 2009/10 vintages are great and unsurprisingly got the highest scores, 2008 confirmed it status as a Bdx vintage that is excellent to drink today. More information/rankings in the tasting story.
  
  TN: Intense nose with lots of green bell pepper, herbs, minerality with some darker fruits in the background. Some floral note too. With time the nose gets cleaner, lots of cola, minerality, some spices. On the palate this shows very fresh, lots of tension, nice creaminess. The fruit takes the backseat as it is all about herbs and minerality. Medium length only. At first this was not drinking on a 93 pts but this wine got better by the minute and my guess that 30 more minutes in the glass and this could have crushed the competition.
  
  Decanting: Lafleur generally needs a lot of age and time to fully open up. My guess is that this would have needed 2-3 hours in the decanter. At least.

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