2015 Château Léoville Las Cases

Community Tasting Notes (33) Avg Score: 95.4 points

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  1/12/2024 - Lord of the Bottles Likes this wine: 92 Points

  In its youth comes across strikingly similar to the ‘15 Clos du Marquis served right before. Blue and red fruit palate. Nose more closed. Hold. 92+

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  10/9/2023 - englishman's claret wrote: 94 Points

  The 2015 Léoville Las Cases is one of those wines which makes you glad you've got a full decanter and a free afternoon, evolving strikingly as the day progresses. At its debut, this is a wine which seems obviously from a warm vintage, showing ripe wild strawberry, warm earth, and hints of sundried tomato, beef blood, sandalwood, and blueberry with an easy, enveloping nose. Yet with air, the nose veers toward the black and blue-fruited end of the spectrum, the torrefactive notes replaced by more classical pencil and saline. The alcohol feels a touch high here (it comes in at 13.8% but doesn't seem as effortlessly balanced as the same value does in the 2009) at its debut; I wonder if the acidity quite matches it (pH 3.7) but the sensation of warmth is lost as the fruit expands. By the next day the sun-kissed quality re-emerges on the nose though the palate remains classical, cultivating a bit of the telltale LLC lavender potpourri and pencil.
  
  It will be interesting to see how this rendition of Léoville Las Cases evolves. While it should fully absorb its oak in 5-10 years, it's not that simple and fundamentally the wine seems a bit Janus-like: one face toward classical Las Cases and the other beholding the warmth of the vintage.
  
  85 CS, 6 M, 9CF harvested Sept 22-Oct 9.

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  8/14/2023 - alexbhurst1678 wrote:

  Dinner w Amanda in august

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  11/23/2022 - Michael Hung Likes this wine: 94 Points

  [From memory, short TN]
  Deep purple. Quite enjoyable right now, albeit still too young to really get past the big primary black fruits. Cassis, blackberries, black cherries, quite juicy for a Bordeaux. Lots of potential. 95+

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  11/1/2022 - csimm wrote: 95 Points

  Bordeaux tasting - with a few pirates: Linear, primary, tannic, and a little annoyed (or maybe that was me being annoyed at it), the 2015 was a wine I had Coravin’d the day prior to sample it to see just where it was at. Peeved was where it was at then. The next day, I popped the cork a few hours before the tasting event, recorked it, shook it up a bit, and left it open in the bottle in hopes it might shock it to life. I feared decanting it might shut it completely down. By the time of the event, it had started to open up a bit more, with bitter blackberry, black currant, dusty spice, and river rock notes peeking out. The bottle of this I had earlier in the month seemed much more red-fruited. This bottle had black fruit, but also maintained a classical profile with bits of cedar and red-currant entering the picture. As my previous note mentions, this is a wine that should benefit with a bit of age. It is begrudgingly starting to open up. Profile-wise, I preferred this 2015 to the 1996 Cases next to it, but they were both good for different reasons.
  
  By day two and three on this same bottle, the leftovers had completely shut down. It’s best performance was on the night of the tasting toward the end of the evening. This wasn’t a showstopper overall, but it has a sophistication that I’m drawn to. 95-ish+ points from me.

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