2016 Château Lafite Rothschild

Community Tasting Notes (10) Avg Score: 96.9 points

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  1/26/2024 - sdr Likes this wine: 94 Points

  Whole Lotta Lafite; 1/26/2024-1/27/2024 (Wine Watch, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida): Much more suave than the teeth staining 2018, this 2016 is only moderately tannic and easier to drink. Lots of black fruit. Moderately oaky. Stylish. Will not take decades to come around but it is of course primary now. Rated for potential.

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  9/16/2023 - Tazmangler wrote:

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  8/2/2020 - Lord of the Bottles Likes this wine:

  Painfully young thought with some more depth than the '16 Carruades next to it. Milk chocolate, red berries, burnt toast, and a vanilla nose. I see some of the high scores here but withholding my score as very tough to rate at this stage.

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  7/13/2020 - JS79 Likes this wine: 99 Points

  67Pm tasting with Jean-Guillaume Prats
  
  Just incredibly elegant. Gorgeous fruit, cake mix/candied cherries over that cigar box.
  
  Perhaps only not perfect because you sense it has places to go.
  
  Very simply if you have the chance to drink it, do.

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  4/19/2020 - Keith Levenberg Likes this wine: 100 Points

  My journey down the 1855 classification this vintage reached its terminus, so the only way out was up. Thus, in brazen defiance of the hourglass passive-aggressively etched into the bottle shoulder entreating all who are tempted to allow it more time, I popped the 2016 Lafite and even before pouring anything out, the aromatics shot out of the bottle like dark spirits escaping a crypt. (Suggested soundtrack: John Williams' "Duel of the Fates.") It's just about the deepest and most wide-ranging array of scents you'll encounter this vintage, with the expected cedarwood and gravel swamped by carnal scents mixing some body funk with the dark undertones of scorched, blackened meat. In the glass, it has an opaque purple-black core with a bright, luminous ruby/magenta rim which carries through to a fruit profile that brings a lively juiciness to the typically Pauillac cedar-tinged red berry and spice-mulled apple fruit. The result is a geodesic dome bound by taut, high tension wire that contributes nearly as much to the structure as the tannins, which have the pinprick-acuity that makes it possible to call them refined but are also positively searing to the point where talking about refinement starts to feel a little silly. But if it manages to find its finesse in spite of this it owes a lot to that inimitably Lafite feminine figure, those Audrey Hepburn lines - while this may need years in the cellar to polish down those tannins and let the flavors blossom, it doesn't need to lose any baby fat. The aristocratic bearings and poise are already here.

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