2007 Château d'Yquem Sauternes (375 mL) Half-Bottle

Whether it’s next week or in 50 years, we'll know it when it comes: the perfect moment when we feel moved to go into the cellar, bring up the ultimate celebration wine, uncork it and share it with our closest friends and loved ones.  

We can’t think of one that qualifies more than today’s 2007 Château d’Yquem Sauternes Premier Grand Cru Classé Supérieur. Perhaps the most revered wine in the world, Château d’Yquem was so unique in its quality at the time of the 1855 Bordeaux classification that it was given its own category—whereas the First Growths are known as Premier Grand Cru Classé, Yquem is the lone wine distinguished as “Supérieur.” 

The 2007 is one of the finest bottles of Château d’Yquem ever rated by Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, which has reported on nearly sixty Château d’Yquem vintages dating back two centuries—they call it a “Rip Van Winkle” wine that can cellar for “generations.” If that sounds like hyperbole, consider that Parker himself rated the 1811 vintage 100 points when he tasted it nearly 190 years after bottling. In other words, if there's such a thing as an immortal wine, Château d’Yquem is it. 

Parker’s Wine Advocate bestowed the 98+ point rating on the 2007 wine just last year, calling it “difficult to resist now.” Those who partake soon will encounter a golden yellow elixir with brassy tints and tones of exuberant pineapple, dried mango, and chamomile on the nose. The tropical fruit flavors are joined with candied ginger, honey and preserved citrus, with a distinct core of salinity and crushed rocks anchoring the luscious nature of the fruit. The wine’s creeping acidity crescendos on the finish to cleanse the palate, demanding another sip. 

You can always count on Wine Access’s perfect provenance, and we’ve imported just 60 bottles of this elixir directly from Yquem’s cellars, in perfect condition. We recommend a bottle to enjoy in the near term—life is short, after all—and another couple to keep in the cellar for any moment in the next two centuries. 

Yquem is perhaps the most celebrated white wine on the planet because of rare conditions and extraordinary effort. The soils at Yquem are unique—undulating slopes rising to high elevations for the area, comprised of clay, gravel, and a deep bed of limestone. The autumn mists at Yquem encourage the grapes to form what the French call pourriture noble (Botrytis cinerea, or “noble rot”), which aids evaporation and thereby concentration. The vineyard crew passes through and selectively picks each row an average of six times before the harvest is complete. Yields are minuscule—just 9 hectoliters per hectare, roughly one-fifth that of the First Growths of Pauillac, Lafite Rothschild, and Latour—and the grapes are gently pressed three times before being transferred to 100% new oak barrels, where the wine is left to age for three years before bottling. 

For 214 years, from 1785 to 1999, one family held court over Yquem. Alexandre de Lur Saluces was the last member of the family to manage the estate, from 1967 until pressures from the family forced him to sell in 1999. Today, Pierre Lurton, of Cheval Blanc, manages the estate under the stewardship of LVMH.

Perhaps Yquem’s most famous visitor arrived as far back as 1784, the year Thomas Jefferson visited Sauternes. Upon his return to Monticello, Jefferson wrote, “This is the best white wine of France and the best of it is made by Monsieur de Lur-Saluces.” As our first Secretary of State, Jefferson ordered 250 bottles of the 1784 Château d’Yquem for himself—and a few more for President Washington. When you cellar or sip a bottle of Yquem, you’re participating in one of the most sacred traditions in wine, bar none. You owe it to yourself.