Michel Bettane and Thierry Desseauve | Magnificently taken over by Denise and Stephen Adams, this growth has been able to express the full potential of its marvelous terroir, without doubt one of the most outstanding in St-Emilion. Intense, deep body, supported by extremely fine tannins, velvety, delicate finish. This wine is undoubtedly one of our major recommendations of this vintage. | 93

Michael Schuster | Slightly raisiny-ripe to smell; full, alcoholic, firmly tannic; sweet and fresh, and somewhat dried by its new wood (100 percent new wood sample?). Pure and juicy and clearly made from good-quality fruit with the year’s freshness and defining vitality, a moderate complexity, but drily tannic from the oak, and slightly warm from the alcohol to finish, though with a nice persistence of fruit too. As with many St-Emilions, what you taste is marked at least as much by its winemaking style as by its vineyard origins. I have no idea of the maturing track record of this wine because it is the first time I have tasted it, but in the 19th century it was mentioned, qualitatively, in the same breath as Canon, Pavie, Troplong Mondot, so the terroir is clearly potentially very fine. Currently the style is very late 1990s/early 2000s super-ripe, fairly extracty and new oak-marked. It will take its time therefore. And it will be nice, if that is what you like. (The 2007, tasted alongside, at ten years of age, was a very pretty wine at heart, with an attractive early bouquet of truffles and undergrowth, but on the palate its sweet, delicate fruit was hardened and parched by its [ill-considered?] 100 percent new-wood astringency. The proportion of new wood aging is now much less, though still very clear.) Made with a more restrained hand, I suspect that the wine’s potential finesse and class would be rather more apparent. 2027–37+. | 89–91?