1970 Latour a Pomerol, Pomerol

It had been fully a decade since I last crossed paths with a bottle of the superb 1970 Latour à Pomerol and the passage of time has been kinder to the wine than it has been to me. This is truly a beautiful bottle of wine, with the depth and structural integrity of the 1970 vintage today very much in evidence. As readers may recall from an article on this vintage in Bordeaux a couple of years back, the 1970s today show more depth and backbone than was the case during the previous ten to fifteen years (behaving a bit more like a Burgundy vintage in its evolution than the more linear style of most Bordeaux vintages), and this is very much in evidence in this outstanding bottle of ’70 Latour à Pomerol. The simply stunning nose soars from the glass in a blaze of black plums, black truffles, cigar smoke, a gorgeous base of soil tones, gamebirds and a touch of orange peel in the upper register. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, pure and velvety on the attack, with a sappy core of fruit, marvelous complexity and balance, melting tannins and superb length and grip on the utterly refined finish. This is a great vintage of Latour à Pomerol that has decades of life still ahead of it.

This wine has always offered an opulent, rich, concentrated, glorious mouthful of Pomerol. Although there was considerable amber at the edge, this bottle exhibited loads of fruit, as well as a sweet, glycerin-dominated mid-section. With a complex, truffle, coffee, mocha, chocolatey, black-cherry-scented nose, this exotic, fat, ripe Latour a Pomerol remains one of the vintage's great successes....