Michel Bettane and Thierry Desseauve: The bouquet already has incomparable charm and focused fruit. The wine shines with its super-fine tannins, its taffeta-like core, and its unending, profound length. Clearly, this is a truly great Ausone. 19.5

John Gilman: After the stunning 2009 Ausone, the 2010 is a bit of a letdown. The nose is deep, sappy, and very ripe but nearly avoids overripeness as it offers up a complex blend of black cherries, coffee, woodsmoke, tobacco leaf, a suave blend of classy new oak, and just a touch of framboise in the upper register. On the palate, the wine is deep, full-bodied, complex, and just a touch fiery, with firm, ripe, and well-integrated tannins, some brusque acidity, and a very long, complex, and seriously tannic finish. The free-range acids are currently more worrisome than the hard tannins, since there should be sufficient depth of fruit here to outlast the tannins. But those acids will need to be assimilated if the wine is to attain Ausone’s customary seamless elegance when the wine is eventually mature. At this point, it is not at all clear that this will happen, but perhaps the 2010 Ausone was just very late out of malo and the coarseness of the acidity today is simply a reflection of that phenomenon. No one at the château, however, seemed nonplussed about the showing of the wine. 2025–75. 15.5/17.5

Michael Schuster: Super-sweet and fragrant to smell; concentrated, very finely but very drily tannic structure—some of it currently from the new wood; fresh in acidity. A great concentration of pure, intensely sweet fruit to taste, long, linear, delicate, clearly mineral behind the sweetness. Some alcoholic warmth, yes, but remaining delicate despite the weight; racy, vital, exciting, with great, scented, lemony-fresh, cassis-sweet length. A Burgundy-like combination of power and delicacy, but with a very long-term tannin: 15–20 years, and then a couple of generations! 2025–50+. 18.5/19.5