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Brunello Di Montacino Collection 
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This stunning wine is still extremely young, with an amazingly expressive nose with tea leaf hints. The aromatics keep building and building in the glass, and the elegance and persistency shine through. This was a drought year, unusual because it was almost perfect from beginning to end with not a drop of rain from May to October. Temperatures were not hot like 2003, of course, so the ripening was slow and complete, with relatively small yields and relatively high alcohol. This is full of energy and the flavours just keep on going, while those tannis have really started to embrace the fruit and showcase their elegance. It's concentrated and luscious yet focussed and beautifully balanced - the perfect example of how they don't need excess to deliver something truly extraordinary in Bordeaux.
Drinking Window: 2020 - 2045
Reviewer Name: Jane Anson
Review Date: 24th May 2018
An incredible nose, so subtle with red fruits, mint, minerals, and all sorts of flowers give way to Cohiba cigar tobacco. The palate has such freshness and density, with perfectly polished tannins. Slightly leathery, like a wonderful Hermes bag. What a wine, please leave this for another ten years. Pull the cork in 2020. 10% Merlot.
Drinking Window: 2022 - 2050
Review Date: 23rd February 2011
Delivers blackberry, dried porcini, tobacco and licorice aromas. Full-bodied, with layers of velvety tannins and loads of dark chocolate, cigar box, currant, berry and mineral. The finish is long, with a coffee, almost meaty, aftertaste. Very beautiful and balanced. Best after 2013. -JS
Drinking Window: 2020 - 2050
Reviewer Name: James Suckling
Review Date: 31st March 2008
For the third year in a row, Bordeaux experienced drought. In other words, not a drop of rain from May to October. As always, however, our good vines, faithful and strong, adapted and overcame these difficult moments. The summer temperatures remained reasonable, and ripening was slow, calm and very complete. The grapes remained small and concentrated. Small quantities, high degrees, a perfect state of health. The most demanding of winegrowers was content. A famously perfect year throughout the growing season.
This was the star of the tasting for pure, inherent quality – a truly glorious wine that will presumably continue to impress those lucky enough to taste it for many decades to come. Very dark, shaded crimson. The most gorgeous panoply of aromas on the nose – not yet knit but just starting to integrate. Exceptionally promising. Absolutely marvellous wine that was extremely difficult to spit. Fresh but ripe with great life and energy. The density of fruit covered the considerable charge of tannin. Such verve! So healthy. Some pure stoniness on the mid palate.
Drinking Window: 2024 - 2060
Reviewer Name: Jancis Robinson
Review Date: 24th May 2018
(700-) Bright medium ruby. Knockout nose combines black- and redcurrant, minerals, graphite, licorice and lavender. Wonderfully suave and seamless, but with great purity and precision of flavor and terrific inner-palate perfume and lift. This dances over every square millimeter of the palate. Almost painfully young today, with an impression of fresh acidity serving to intensify the wine's flavors. About as austere a wine as I tasted from this vintage in April and yet it's not hard. Finishes with substantial dusty tannins and a whiplash of minerally perfume. I'd forget about this one for about 15 years.
Drinking Window: 2020 - 2050
Reviewer Name: Stephen Tanzer
Review Date: 1st May 2008
The 2005 Lafite-Rothschild is a gorgeous wine, but it is also very young. Readers lucky enough to own it will find a very classic, gracious Lafite-Rothschild that still needs a few years to be at its best. Bright red-toned fruit, crushed rocks, mint and licorice open first, followed by darker aromas and flavors that develop as the wine gains volume with air. Tasted next to its peers, Lafite is so typical of itself and less marked by the year. And that is one of the signs of a truly great terroir. Lafite-Rothschild is not as showy as many other wines in this vintage, but it is so true to its own identity, and that is the highest compliment I can pay it. The 2005 is 89% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Merlot and 1% Petit Verdot, done in 100% new oak, which is not at all noticeable. At the time, the Cabernet percentage was quite high, but that has now become the norm. Tasted two times.
Drinking Window: 2025 - 2055
Reviewer Name: Antonio Galloni
Review Date: 1st April 2021
96-98 Barrel sample. Deceptively soft, dusty tannins; underneath this velvet veneer, the wine is a powerhouse of dry firmness. It's a powerful expression of Cabernet Sauvignon with great ripeness and cassis flavors.
Drinking Window: 2020 - 2050
Review Date: 20th June 2006
Having tasted the 2005 Château Lafite-Rothschild several times both blind and non-blind, it comes across as a First Growth politely requesting more time to settle. Here, from an ex-château bottle tasted in Bordeaux, it delivers that graphite, pencil-box bouquet that unfurls gradually in the glass, biding its time, graceful but not intense. Parallel to some of its fellow 2005s, it is developing a little more spice, namely thyme and sage, than I recall. The palate is medium-bodied and beautifully balanced, to wit, a sophisticated Pauillac that priorities elegance and poise over intensity of fruit—in keeping with Lafite Rothschild's style. You come away with the sense that it will take its time and decline, giving away a great deal in its primacy, even if it is still more approachable than the 2005 Latour for example. Therefore, I would be inclined to set this aside for several more years. Tasted November 2014.
Drinking Window: 2022 - 2050
Reviewer Name: Neal Martin
Review Date: 29th July 2016
(88.8% cabernet sauvignon, 10.7% merlot and 0.5% petit verdot) Bright ruby-red. Discreet aromas of crushed cassis, cedar and cool licorice. Juicy, very tight and penetrating, with brooding black fruit, graphite and mineral flavors. At once suave and austere, with very firm but fine-grained tannins and slowly mounting flavors that go on and on. This has an IPT of 70, like the 2003, but has a slightly lower pH and higher acidity (3.3 grams, vs. just 3 for the 2003). And the alcohol here is just 12.9%. My score may prove to be conservative. This wine is a cinch to develop in bottle for three decades or more, and should probably not be broached until at least 2017.
Reviewer Name: Stephen Tanzer
Review Date: 8th December 2014
