2010 Château Smith Haut Lafitte Pessac-Léognan 750 ml

Smith Haut Lafitte is one of Bordeaux’s modern icons. With powerfully intense fruit, a perfectly honed structure, and mesmerizing complexity, this 2010 challenges Haut-Brion for the top spot in Pessac-Léognan. 

We’re able to offer this library wine with perfect provenance thanks to our connections in Bordeaux, and it's hard to think of anything else we could want in a bottle of Graves. From the legendary 2010 vintage, this bottle is starting to blossom now that it’s over a decade old—with a recent 98-point score from the Wine Advocate confirming that it’s rocketing toward legendary status.

Parker himself called the wine a “qualitative home run” out of barrel and an “extraordinary performance” in his original 98+ review, praising its “stunningly concentrated” profile, which boasted “laser-like definition” and a “remarkable nose.” Decanter magazine echoed those sentiments, describing it as “an incredible wine” and “a classic example of how Pessac-Léognan can deliver perfect tightrope balance in its best wines.”

The wine is better now than when those reviews were written—tasting this bottle was one of our highlights of the year. The nose is classic Pessac, with fresh black currant aromas mixing with baked blueberries and an intense vein of gravel, cedar, and tobacco. The palate is just beginning to soften, and two hours in a decanter allow the wine to show off a potent mix of black fruits, accented by the beginning of bottle-age flavors like leather, forest floor, and Virginia tobacco. It was glorious to drink—and we’re counting the days until we open another bottle.

Although the estate was founded over 600 years ago, when the Du Boscq family honed in on the potential of a gravelly plateau that was known locally as “Lafitte," it has only realized its potential since Florence and Daniel Cathiard bought it in 1990. The two have poured time and money into the Château, building a new winery and converting the farming to an exacting, organic-informed standard.

Since then, the team has honed in on individual terroirs and adopted so-called "bio-precision" in the vineyard, using satellites to monitor tiny details across their vineyards and time their harvest perfectly on a row-by-row basis. They sort the grapes multiple times—both in the vineyard and in the winery, where they use high-tech optical sorting technology to ensure only perfect berries make it into their wines.

However, the most defining detail at Smith Haut Lafitte is the fact that it has made nearly all of its own barrels since 1995, joining First Growths Châteaux Lafite, Margaux, and Haut-Brion as the rare Bordeaux properties with an onsite cooperage. Devotion to quality doesn’t get more hands-on—or labor-intensive—than that, and it's emblematic of the lengths the Cathiards will go to for this wine.

Both Wine Spectator and Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate consider 2010 to be Pessac-Léognan’s greatest-ever vintage, with each awarding the year a 99-point score. Smith Haut Lafitte is one of the standouts—a wine that’s captivating now and will only become more breathtaking with time.