2024 Lafite Rothschild
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Tasting Notes
The 2024 Lafite has one of its highest-ever proportions of Cabernet Sauvignon, at 96% (its 1961 was pure Cabernet after frost hit their Merlot). The nose is quiet at first, slowly revealing perfumed layers of graphite, iris, peony and blackcurrant aromatics. The palate revelas a wine of delicacy and finesse – with fine-textured, mineral tannins, seamless and feathered. Pure, long and fresh, with impressive persistence, it’s – unsurprisingly – one of the best results in Pauillac this year. Aged in 50% new oak, 12.9% alcohol and 3.8pH. Blend: 96% Cabernet Sauvignon, 3% Merlot, 1% Petit Verdot
Critic Scores
Average Score
William Kelley, Wine Advocate
Jane Anson, Inside Bordeaux
More reviews and scores
A blend of 96% Cabernet Sauvignon, 3% Merlot and 1% Petit Verdot, the 2024 Lafite Rothschild offers up aromas of minty blackcurrants, violets, incense, loamy soil and cigar box, followed by a medium-bodied, pillowy and open-knit palate built around tangy acids and powdery tannins, concluding with a discreetly herbal finish. Harvest began on September 24 and concluded on October 4, delivering a Lafite in something of a throwback style, nodding to the wines made here in the 1970s.
Rich texture, this stands head and shoulders above many in the vintage, with graphite, crayon and cassis bud rather than exuberant black fruits. This is precise, savoury, delineated, floral, gunsmoke, juicy, captures the effortless elegance that Lafite does so so well, and it totally delivers. Harvest 23 September to 7 October, 32hl/h yield, above the Pauillac average, 16% press wine included in the blend. Director Eric Kohler's 33rd year in Pauillac. I am giving a slightly earlier begin drinking date than usual, but I am certain this will age exceptionally well as Lafite always does.
Pauillac; 96% Cabernet Sauvignon; 3% Merlot; 1% Petit Verdot; a final yield of 32 hl/ha and representing just a third of the total production; 12.9% alcohol; the first vintage certified organic; tasted at Duhart-Milon with Saskia de Rothschild). Quite plump and plush for the vintage. Like its stablemate Duhart this is very spherical in its shape in the mouth, with gloriously refined cashmere tannins encircling the fresh, bright, crisp and crunchy dark berries and the black cherries – just à point – that form the dense and compact core around which the wine is structured vertically. Horizontally, the wine is again highly structured by a very well-defined central spine around which the graphite seems to gather with the tannins in this dimension stretching out the fruit over the palate. Very classical, very pure and precise, very focussed and always tender, soft and gently seductive. Almost opulent, but never quite, the austerity of the vintage reining it back and rendering this a little more ethereal and also a little more intellectual in the process.
About the producer
Ch. Lafite Rothschild is one of the most famous wine estates in Bordeaux and the world. One of the Left Bank’s five First Growths, the Pauillac property is renowned for producing wines of finesse and elegance that age beautifully.