Michel Bettane and Thierry Desseauve: This year’s vintage confirms the masterful return of the cru to Bordeaux’s highest rank after a few irregularities during the early part of the decade. Built-in depth and freshness, offering up exceptional aromatic clarity, intensity, velvety tannins, and distinction. In short, the best of the best. 20

John Gilman: Cheval Blanc has a fairly high proportion of Merlot for this estate. It is an extremely powerful young vintage of Cheval Blanc, and worlds away from the refined and opulently seductive style of the 2009. The bouquet offers up a dense and very ripe blend of black cherries, menthol, coffee bean, a good base of gravelly soil, cigar smoke, and new oak. On the palate, the wine is deep, full-bodied, and seamless on the attack, with plenty of overt ripeness in evidence, a rock-solid core of fruit, and plenty of substantial, well-integrated tannins on the very long and powerful finish. This will need plenty of time in the cellar to blossom but should turn out to be a fine bottle with sufficient bottle age. It avoids the pitfalls of surmaturité, questionable balance, and uncovered alcohol that plague so many of its neighbors this vintage, but it is a rather atypically broad-shouldered vintage for this great estate. 2025–75+? 17.5/18.5

Michael Schuster: Deep, spicily aromatic Cabernet Franc-dominated character on the nose; rich, concentrated, lively wine, with a notably fine, satiny tannin. Ripe, sweet yet fresh, great gentle energy across the palate; minerally, fragrant, fine-textured. Very complex and vivid, violet-scented, and with terrific length. A great Cheval Blanc, refined, aristocratic, complete. A taut, linear style, rather than a particularly fleshy one, but no hardness, no heaviness, and a wonderful nerve of freshness and definition. 2022–35+. 18.5/19+