Château Lynch-Bages 2025

Dried floral scents, some cocoa powder, mint, red berries and sweet rose petals. Clean and crystalline, a lovely purity and soft chalky touch to the tannins which fill the mouth but don’t overwhelm. Feels quite a restrained style for Lynch, delicate almost, a gentle lick of liquorice, slate and wet stone with blackcurrant fruit. Quite a long style, very charming, juicy but really overall quite finessed/hands off. Ageing will add on a bit of added texture. Grippy, fleshy, chalky but cool. 3% Petit Verdot completes the blend. 3.68pH.

The perfume kicks off with creme de cassis, blackberries, flowers, peppery herbs, cigar wrappers, and tobacco, and mint leaves. The palate delivers its message with creamy-textures, and racy tannins. The wealth of fruit you taste, and feel wraps everything up perfectly with its ocean of of chewy currants, sweetness, lift, length, and complexity filling your palate with its weight and density. It is also seemingly weightless, and deceptively easy to drink. The character of the vintage was shaped in large part by its low yields which produced tiny berries with thick skins giving a small, juice to skins ratio. The wine blends 66% Cabernet Sauvignon, 28% Merlot, 3% Cabernet Franc, and 3% Petit Verdot. 13.3% ABV. 3.70 pH. The harvest took place September 9 - September 21. Yields averaged 30 hectoliters per hectare. The Grand Vin was made from 65% of the harvest. Drink from 2032 -2065. 96-98 Pts

Damson, cassis, bilberry, a wine that doesn't feel so far away from the very top vintages of the estate, clear expansion in the mid palate, with an uncompromising architecture that has the supple tannins of a warm year, with pomegranate, incense, blackberry, cedar, slate, crushed rocks. Excellently put together with juice, promise and personality. 3.68 pH. 75% new oak. Harvest September 9 to 21. Jean-Charles Cazes owner, along with his three sisters, Nicolas Labenne technical director.

Clearly marked by oak aging, the bouquet of Lynch Bages also reveals nuances of ripe black berries and praline, rounded out by a touch of graphite. Creamy and slightly suave on the attack, the wine is driven by a powerful structure. The tannins have breadth, grip, and freshness. A confident style, yet revisited. It seems to me that extractions have been reined in, which may also be linked to a lower alcohol level than in recent years! Note that there is still plenty of substance, but it is part of a broader whole where it doesn’t dominate the show. A wine built for long aging.

Deep, intense, purplish-red colour. Very aromatic nose, refined, fruity, pure, ripe and subtle. Full-bodied on the attack and through the mid-palate, with flavour and a tight but tasty tannic structure, the wine melts into the finish. It ends on a good, fragrant length with a touch of positively austere character. Blend: 66% Cabernet Sauvignon, 28% Merlot, 3% Cabernet Franc, 3% Petit Verdot. Alcohol: 13.3% - pH: 3.68. Yield: 32 hl/ha. 4% press wine.