1914 Château Lagrange (St. Julien)

Community Tasting Notes (1) Avg Score: 98 points

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  1/28/2016 - Keith Levenberg wrote: 98 Points

  Started out great, got better and better in the glass, and finished up spectacular. The first taste shows fairly high-pitched juicy apple and cherry fruit, which continues deepening in tone as it breathes. In short order the aromas and flavors segue from underbrush to tobacco and cigar box, the back end smoky with the old wood sensation of a creaky antique spice drawer. There is a mild herbal streak, like sage or something else fresh and leafy. By the last glass the complexion has seriously darkened, no more of that juicy fruit at all and all those deep tertiary flavors have moved to the front end and gotten deeper still, the tobacco smoke now more like charcoal smoke, unnameable new things continuing to emerge till the last drop. This has shed all of its outer sheathings and been reduced to its absolute essence, which has the cut and detail and transparency of a ruby. These grapes were on the vine when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot, summer of 1914. Broadbent gave the vintage 3 stars: "August was hot; on the 14th war was declared. The first crop of the war was small but of good quality." This bottle - fill at the high shoulder, color still midway between red and brick, and the original cork solid and intact - was better than any of the fancier names in Broadbent's book showed for him, and did not even give the impression that it might have been better at any point gone by. Sometimes when wines hit these high peaks they just hang there and coast and maybe even find a gust that blows them higher.

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