2010 Château Smith Haut Lafitte Pessac-Léognan 750 ml

Smith Haut Lafitte is one of Bordeaux’s modern icons, a wine that challenges Haut-Brion for the top spot in Pessac-Léognan. With powerfully intense fruit, a perfectly honed structure, and mesmerizing complexity, the 2010 ranks among the most celebrated wines of a legendary vintage—a perfect-scoring Graves that has earned its place in the front rank.

The wine shows classic Pessac character: fresh blackcurrant aromas mixing with baked blueberries and an intense vein of gravel, cedar, and tobacco. The palate carries a potent mix of black fruits, accented by the first bottle-age flavors of leather, forest floor, and Virginia tobacco—the youthful power of 2010 framed by the beginnings of maturity.

Although the estate was founded over 600 years ago, when the Du Boscq family honed in on the potential of a gravelly plateau known locally as “Lafitte,” Smith Haut Lafitte only realized that potential after 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, timing the harvest on a row-by-row basis, and sorting the grapes multiple times—both in the vineyard and in the winery, where high-tech optical sorting ensures only perfect berries make it into the wines.

But 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 Lafite, Margaux, and Haut-Brion as one of 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 captivates now and will only become more breathtaking with time.