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96+ JG. "It had been a couple of years since I last tasted the 1966 Latour, and the wine has continued to blossom dramatically and improve over this time. This is a deep and classic Latour, with the bit of youthful greenness that was on display for the first twenty-five years of its life now long gone, and the wine rich, focused and soil-driven, with excellent sweetness at the core. The bouquet offers up notes of sweet cassis and red cherry, cigar box, summer truffles, woodsmoke, plenty of Latour soil, herb tones and cedary wood. On the palate the wine is full-bodied, deep and flawlessly balanced, with superb depth, melting tannins, excellent acidity (certainly an attribute of yesterday’s claret- I wonder if we will ever say that again about Bordeaux given the low acid profiles of so many vintages from the 1990s and so far in the first decade of this century), and a very long, complex, powerful and aristocratic finish. The ’66 Latour will clearly last another thirty or forty years, as it has just reached its apogee as it nears its fortieth birthday and is a magical drink. This is a brilliant vintage for Latour, and it is distinctly possible that no subsequent vintage of Latour will be able to equal the brilliance of the 1966. To my palate there seems to be just a tad more depth here than in the 1970, and I will be surprised if the 1982 or 1990 Latours will be this profound at their peaks." View From the Cellar, May/Jun 2008, Issue #15 |