Andrew Jefford | Dark, dense midnight black-red in color. The aromas are pure, lifted, poised, and built around a core (maybe it’s more of a fountain) of ultra-fresh blackcurrant fruits which contrive to be both sweet yet appetizing, assertive yet charming, urbane yet comely. There is an aromatic creaminess beneath, too, which gives that fruit its necessary ballast; but in other respects the aromas still need time, since they haven’t had anything else engraved into them via flamboyant élevage. (The oak fills out the fruit, but in this vintage you can barely make it out behind the fruit.) What you get is that core of disarming cool fruited purity, waiting for the work of time. On the palate, this is a wine of purity, poise, harmony, and, yes, even now, drinkability: it brims up in the mouth, communicating all that fruited lyricism and backed by ample textural wealth of the very silkiest kind, and opens up and flowers and fruits there, but then dissolves with astonishing stealthiness, too. Quite hard to mark, in truth, since it is so unstrenuous and naturally articulated compared to some of the vintage’s other top wines—yet we know from the wine’s pedigree that it will still be in fine fettle 60 years from now. What’s equally certain is that this is an exact reading of the vintage... and that this is a vintage that seems made for this wine. Poise, purity, freshness, elegance, and class: that’s 2016. And that’s Lafite. | 97

Michael Schuster | Dense and fine to smell, blackcurrant Cabernet and subtle mineral impressions, noticeably persistent in the glass; medium- to full-bodied wine, fresh in acidity, finely firm in tannin; immediately sweet and refined in flavor, long, mouthcoating, graceful, and subtle, with great length across the mid-palate, and great length of fragrant aftertaste. Understated as usual, but all there, with such subtlety of flavor and terrific tenacity. Class, scope, intensity, and enormous persistence. Its great rewards will require great patience. 2045–70+. | 98