2019 Château Lafite Rothschild Carruades de Lafite

Description

96   James Suckling
“This is a beautiful Carraudes with currant, sweet-tobacco and wet-earth aromas and flavors. Medium-bodied with a dense center-palate and tight, polished tannins. Fresh, with tension. Reminds me of the 1995 Lafite. This is so Lafite in character. It shows so much cabernet sauvignon character. It’s 68% cabernet sauvignon, 27% merlot and the rest cabernet franc. Try after 2026.” (1/2022)

93   Jane Anson
“One of the more concentrated Carruades, with the highest percentage of Cabernet Sauvignon to date, packed with powerful dark plum and blackcurrant fruits, pencil lead and slate. Knitted down, sculpted tannins, there is austerity even rigidity to the structure, but it has laid on weight and depth over ageing. This is a Carruades with a sense of occasion and will need time in bottle. 38hl/h yield, 28% new oak.” (1/2022)

92   William Kelley for Wine Advocate
The 2019 Carruades de Lafite is rich and expansive, bursting with aromas of ripe berries, violets, spice box, cedar and cassis. Medium to full-bodied, ample and fleshy, it’s broad and generous, with a more exotic, extravagant profile than the grand vin but also levels of concentration and character that exceed what was the case a decade ago. In recent years, Lafite has actually ripped up parcels that routinely never made it into the grand vin—and the grand vin now includes more and more Cabernet Sauvignon. Even if Carruades now contains less Merlot than was historically the case (27% in 2019), I suspect it’s benefiting from the inclusion of Merlot that would have formerly made it into the assemblage of Lafite itself. -drink 2025-2045

Today, Château Lafite Rothschild amounts to some 110 hectares planted to some 900,000 vines (including 4.5 hectares of Cabernet Sauvignon in Saint-Estèphe). If that figure strikes readers as smaller than it used to be, that’s because Lafite has ripped up some less optimally situated plots that never tended to produce wine fit for inclusion in the grand vin. As of 2021, what’s more, organic conversion is underway (15 hectares are already farmed biodynamically), and hedges and flowering borders, planted with native species, now begin to break up the monoculture of the vine. Cover crops, too, have been added to the viticultural team’s agronomic arsenal and are delivering good results in parcels with more humid or clay-rich soils. In the winery, Lafite is meticulously traditional: the grapes are sorted twice, once optically, and see a classical maceration in wooden and cement tanks with pump-overs and some use of the gentle “air pulse” system that disrupts the cap and oxygenates the ferment without the need for a full pump-over. Malolactic fermentation, as ever, is in tank, and the wine matures in barrels that are mostly produced in-house, with a light toast and favoring the forests of Allier and Nevers. Each vintage is racked three times, traditionally, with one egg white fining (which requires up to 8,000 eggs). As is the case almost everywhere in the Médoc, the tendency is for less and less Merlot in the assemblage. Eric Kohler describes 2019 as the ideal growing season, which saw a hydric deficit at just the right moment to precipitate ripening; and the result is a wine of irreproachable classicism and elegance. Whether the 2010, 2016 or 2019 Lafite ultimately emerges as the best of the decade is a question that well-heeled wine lovers will have immense pleasure debating over the decades to come, but it is clear that 2019 is the most sensual and aromatically expressive at an early age. It’s one of the wines of the vintage.