Community Tasting Note

Keith Levenberg Likes this wine:

Sunday, April 19, 2020 - 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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