What incredible precision and clarity here. Currants, mineral, mint and lead pencil. Full body, with super refined tannins and a long, long finish. I am loving this young wine. It just builds on the palate. Goes so long. 79% Cabernet Sauvignon, 18% Merlot, 2% Cabernet Franc, and 1% Petit Verdot.

Tasted at the chateau and at the UGC, the Lynch Bages 2010 is a blend of 79% Cabernet Sauvignon, 18% Merlot, 2% Cabernet Franc and 1% Petit Verdot raised in 70% new oak. The nose is a little reticent at first, but builds nicely with aeration with blackberry, cassis, cedar, mint and just a touch of honey. Very good delineation. The palate is full-bodied with a firm, almost vice-like grip but with more than adequate fruit to back it up: blackcurrant, cedar, graphite and a touch of tobacco. Very tannic yet fresh towards the finish that will need a decade to reach its drinking plateau. Excellent. Drink 2020- Tasted April 2011.

This sumptuous wine is driven by perfectly ripe fruit as well as dense, dusty and dry tannins. Great swathes of blackberry sweep across the palate, followed by juicy acidity. Such a combination will make this impressive wine a delight to drink in 10 years and beyond.

Roasted cedar, tobacco and bay leaf notes start off this structured but lively bottling, with intense currant, blackberry and black cherry flavors at the core. The iron-laced grip and pleasantly austere plum pit and licorice snap accents fill in on the tar-tinged finish. Great range, character and typicity. If you ever need to explain Pauillac to someone, give them this. Best from 2018 through 2037.

The 2010 Lynch Bages is an absolutely brilliant wine, and somewhat reminiscent at this stage in its development of the profound 1989. Jean-Charles Cazes, who took over for his father a number of years ago, has produced a magnificent wine with the classic creme de cassis note intermixed with smoke, graphite and spring flowers. It is a massive Lynch Bages, full-bodied and very 1989-ish, with notable power, loads of tannin, and extraordinary concentration and precision. This is not a Lynch Bages to drink in its exuberant youth, but one to hold on to for 5-6 years and drink over the following three decades.