Simon Field: Fulsome, assertive color and a nose of hedgerow, prunes, and potpourri. The tannins coat the mouth with impetuous efficiency, the spirit equally persuasive on the finish. Big-boned and powerful, all the components declamatory and stern; no doubt they will knit together over the longer term. A suivre... | 89

Andrew Jefford: Saturated deep purple-black-red, with lots of well-colored glints in the drips that fall down the glass sides. Lots of leather and tack-room scents already here to lend the beefy fruits support and intrigue. A composty, tobacco-like scent, too; very complex, brooding and moody. Dense, deep, searching, almost titanic on the tongue: quite obviously one of the lordliest wines of 2011, and one with decades ahead of it. A drenching rain of tannins, though they are fine and unbrutal; then a dark drench of black fruits, too, in somber and unexuberant style, but also less primary, pure, and pretty than many. It’s almost as if you have to take the glories of this wine on trust; you can see everything there, but it’s subterranean for the time being, a question of eddies and swirls on the surface, and we won’t know what it’s truly going to do for a decade or two. | 96

Richard Mayson: Deep, opaque; closed in on itself on the nose, with only the spirit showing through, though there is ripe, beefy fruit underlying; big, plump initially with solid, tight, powerful, rather unyielding tannins rising rapidly in the mouth and subsiding slowly on the finish, but the fruit doesn’t really reveal itself at this stage. | 89