Ratings & Tasting Notes:

97 points — Wine Advocate, August 2019
Pale to medium lemon-gold, with a mineral, earth-tinged nose of chalk dust, wet pebbles and dried wild mushroom over warm apricot, green mango, honeyed toast, ginger and pink grapefruit, plus honeycomb, orange blossom and saffron. Still somewhat closed on the palate, offering glimpses of tightly wound layers framed by a racy acid line and creamy texture, finishing long and perfumed. Judged to need another five to seven years in bottle.

97 points — Wine Enthusiast, December 2009
Not so much sweet as wonderfully rich, its character built on the concentration of botrytis. A velvet texture with a spicy bite, showing apricot, honey and marzipan in a wine set to age over decades. Cellar Selection.

97 points — Wine Spectator, 2012
A deliciously pure feel, with juicy green plum, ginger, heather, creamed pineapple and Jonagold apple melded together and gliding through a lengthy finish that echoes with lilting flowers and dried citrus.

96 points — Vinous, April 2022
Limpid gold in hue, with a gorgeous, finely tuned and precise bouquet of honey, vanilla pod and saffron. Built on exquisite poise, the acidity keeping the wine on its toes, and apparently gaining in concentration and viscosity with age, with fig and tangerine notes and a slight nuttiness on the close.

95 points — James Suckling

94 points — Decanter

Cult Wines International Notes:

Yquem stands alone. In the 1855 classification commissioned for the Paris Universal Exposition, it was the only estate in all of Bordeaux named Premier Cru Classé Supérieur, a rank created for it and never granted to another. The property lies on a gravel rise in Sauternes, roughly a hundred hectares in production planted to Sémillon with a quarter Sauvignon Blanc, and its magic depends on the Ciron, a cold tributary that meets the warmer Garonne and lays autumn mists across the vines. Those mists bring Botrytis cinerea, the noble rot that shrivels the berries and concentrates their sugar and aromatics. Pickers pass through the vineyard again and again, taking only berries at the right point of shrivel, and in years the family judges unworthy no wine is bottled at all. Yields are famously tiny: the old measure is a glass of wine per vine.

2005 was a year of constant sunshine without punishing heat, and a cooler late summer that held acidity in the berries. Alternating rain and dry warmth through September and October let the noble rot develop properly, giving fruit rich in both sugar and aroma. The wine that resulted is built on poise rather than weight: pale to medium gold, with apricot, green mango, honeyed toast, ginger and pink grapefruit over a chalky mineral undertone, and threads of honeycomb, orange blossom and saffron. A racy line of acidity carries a creamy texture to a long, perfumed finish. It is drinking well now and will improve for decades.

Bottle Size:

750 mL

Storage History:

Always stored on its side in a climate-controlled cellar.

Condition:

Please note: The bottle shown is the exact bottle being sold.

Outstanding condition.