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2019 Château Lafleur

Removed from a professional wine storage facility; Purchased direct from winery

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RATINGS

100The Wine Advocate

...aromas of rose petals, raspberries and sweet spices mingled with notions of blood orange, violets and fresh tobacco... Full-bodied, deep and seamless, it's layered and multidimensional, with a concentrated core of vibrant fruit, lively acids and ripe, powdery tannins, concluding with a long, searingly intense finish. This magical Lafleur is unquestionably one of the wines of the vintage.

100James Suckling

This is crazy on the nose with crushed stones and violets really rising above the glass, together with iodine, seaweed and ink. Spellbinding. Full-bodied, yet so tight and reserved, with a fine cashmere-like texture and endless length and energy. You can sense the stones and the earth here, but then it reaches to the skies. It’s open, but you feel the depth of the soil.

100Jeb Dunnuck

...such a complex, singular profile in its black raspberries, kirsch liqueur, licorice, exotic flowers, white truffles, and sandalwood. On the palate, it has serious structure, yet the tannins build with time in the glass, and the mid-palate density and balance are so flawlessly integrated, you have to actually hunt for the structure. Pure, sensationally rich, and at the same time elegant, with awesome depth of fruit, this is what wine dreams are made of.

99Vinous / IWC

Mulberry intermixed with pencil box and undergrowth...palate is medium-bodied with fine-grain tannins, symmetrical, quite austere with Early Grey, bay leaf and clove, superb crescendo towards the almost audacious finish. Stunning.

19Jancis Robinson

Light, fresh, transparent on the nose but so sweet and gorgeous on the palate. Good combo! Very long and detailed. Real richness and complexity here. Throat-warming.

PRODUCER

Château Lafleur

Located in the shadow of the famous Château Petrus estate, tiny Château Lafleur with its 11 acres of Pomerol vineyards was for much of its history known only to the most knowledgeable Bordeaux connoisseurs. Like most wine estates in France it was a family business for several centuries, and in the 1940s it was inherited by two sisters, Therese and Marie Robin, who never married or had children. The sisters quietly ran the estate until their deaths, often making outstanding wine. Since 1985 the estate has been run by Sylvie and Jacques Guinaudeau, niece and nephew to the Robin sisters. The pair has modernized winemaking using new oak casks for some vintages. Most critics agree that one key to the quality of the wine is the vineyard’s terroir, which benefits from deposits of phosphorus and potassium. Vineyards are planted to 50% Cabernet France and 50% Merlot, and the average vine is 30 years old. About 12,000 bottles of Château Lafleur are produced annually.

REGION

France, Bordeaux, Pomerol

Pomerol is the smallest of Bordeaux’s red wine producing regions, with only about 2,000 acres of vineyards. Located on the east side of the Dordogne River, it is one of the so-called “right bank” appellations and therefore planted primarily to Merlot. Pomerol is unique in Bordeaux in that it is the only district never to have been rated in a classification system. Some historians think Pomerol’s location on the right bank made it unattractive to Bordeaux-based wine traders, who had plenty of wine from Medoc and Graves to export to England and northern Europe. Since ranking estates was essentially a marketing ploy to help brokers sell wine, ranking an area where they did little business held no interest for them. Pomerol didn’t get much attention from the international wine community until the 1960s, when Jean-Pierre Moueix, an entrepreneurial wine merchant, started buying some of Pomerol’s best estates and exporting the wines. Today the influential Moueix family owns Pomerol’s most famous estate, Château Pétrus, along with numerous other Pomerol estates. Pomerol wines, primarily Merlot blended with small amounts of Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon, are considered softer and less tannic than left bank Bordeaux.