John Gilman: The grand vin is outstanding and one of the top wines on the Left Bank this year, but it is a wine of immense power and concentration that will need a long time in the cellar to unfold. The wine is ripe but certainly not overripe, and most impressive in its purity and focus, as it offers up a very deep nose of sappy black cherries, dark chocolate, tobacco leaf, espresso, a great base of soil (particularly for this vintage), smoke, and plenty of spicy new oak. On the palate, the wine is deep, full-bodied, and very powerful, with rippling muscles, ripe, well-integrated tannins, great depth, and a very, very long, focused, and slightly heady finish. This is a big-boned and very ripe Las-Cases that should last at least 75 years, and I like it better than the very powerful 2009, as the 2010 seems to have harnessed its power much better and integrated it into a more seamless whole. 2025–2100+. 18/18.5

Michael Schuster: Dense in ripe fruit to smell, with that clear 2010 freshness and delineation of impression; here, too, you notice the spicy edge of Cabernet Franc, as in the Clos du Marquis. Rich, fresh, vital, tannic, but a firmly fine tannin; a sinewy yet refined wine, close-knit, rectilinear, long, sweet-cored, complex, and all the while vivid, and with tremendous scented length. Not the absolute, easy harmony of the 2009 (retasted alongside) but with more immediate impact, more power, more intensity. A penetrating, complex wine, full of both ripe fruit and intense minerality, exhaustingly good; power and elegance, a very Pauillac expression of St-Julien! As with the Clos du Marquis, this is great Las Cases—’86, ’96, and ’06 come to mind. A more masculine, more concentrated expression of the terroir than its very fine ’09, if likely to be much less flattering to taste for a long time. Both are first-growth quality, with the 2010 perhaps just a tad ahead. The difference in style is clearer than any difference in quality. 2022–40+. 18.5+/19