Chateau Leoville Barton St. Julien 2008

A dense, beautifully structured wine. It shows intense, ripe fruit with balanced acidity. It’s the fine tannins that give it such class, surrounding the fruit, promising long aging. This is a classic for Léoville-Barton.  What a nose! Chocolate, berry, meat and spice aromas. Full body, with soft and velvety tannins and a long, long finish. This is solid and rich for the vintage. A beauty. Typically extracted and powerful (which is atypical in a vintage such as 2008), this offering may lack charm, but it is “locked and loaded” with plenty of background oak, huge black cherry and black currant fruit, medium to full body and a boatload of tannin. Forget it for 8-10 years and drink it over the following three decades.