Our Provenance Guarantee
Purchase with confidence. All of our wines are selectively sourced and thoroughly inspected for authenticity and signs of poor storage. Accepted bottles are preserved in our climate-controlled cellar until they reach your doorstep. We have no storefront and no walk-in traffic, so nothing is moved or handled between inspection and shipping.
The bottle you see photographed is the bottle you receive (or fundamentally identical when multiple bottles are listed), and our commitment to you is that it arrives as represented. If it doesn’t, we want to hear from you.
Ratings & Tasting Notes:
100 points — James Suckling (April 2014)
A classic Las Cases, with masses of mineral, floral and blueberry character. Full and chewy, with enormous power.
100 points — Wine Spectator (March 2003)
The reviewer calls it absolutely fantastic and one of the most exciting young reds he had tasted in a long time. Intense aromas of berries, currants and minerals with hints of mint. Full-bodied and packed with fruit and tannins, its long finish refined and silky. A benchmark for the vintage, and evidence that Las Cases, which has always aimed at First Growth quality in a top-notch year, achieved it in 2000. Flagged as collectible and ranked number 5 in the Top 100 Wines of 2003.
99 points — Jeb Dunnuck (June 2019)
Dunnuck finds it brilliant and, like most 2000s, only just entering its drinking window. Smoky black fruits, crushed rocks, lead pencil and menthol emerge from what he calls a blockbuster beauty still tasting as though it were five or six years old. Beautifully concentrated, ripe, sexy and seamless, with the classic elegance and regal quality of the estate front and centre, and another three to four decades of longevity ahead.
98 points — Decanter (Jane Anson, October 2019)
Closing in on two decades, the wine is starting to soften and open, bringing exotic spices to the fore. The inky colour translates into tight black fruit with liquorice, cigar box, graphite and grilled gunsmoke. Still a little fierce in its tannic structure and needing a few more years to be truly welcoming, though the grapes clearly reached full phenolic ripeness. Anson attributes the iron grip to the invariably low pH at Léoville, often below 3.5 as it is here, notes the wine had barely moved since her previous tasting two years earlier, and reports it improves significantly after an hour in the glass and a double decant.
Cult Wines International Notes:
Château Léoville-Las-Cases is the largest and most celebrated fragment of the old Léoville estate, which was divided in the nineteenth century into the three properties that now carry the name. Classified a Second Growth in 1855, Las Cases occupies the northern end of St-Julien, its Grand Clos running right up to the boundary with Château Latour — a position that has shaped both its wine and its ambitions. Under the Delon family it has long been regarded as the most First Growth-like of the Second Growths, making a wine of Pauillac-scale structure and St-Julien refinement, and among the most uncompromisingly long-lived in Bordeaux.
2000 was the millennium vintage and one of the great Bordeaux years of the modern era, and Las Cases made a wine widely held to be among its finest ever. The blend is roughly 77% Cabernet Sauvignon, 14% Merlot and the balance Cabernet Franc. Inky in colour and still youthfully ruby-purple, it offers blueberry, blackcurrant and kirsch over graphite, lead pencil, liquorice, cigar box, crushed rock, menthol, mint and grilled gunsmoke. Full-bodied and densely packed, its notably low pH giving an iron grip, it is concentrated, seamless and profoundly structured, with a refined and silky finish. A wine that has barely begun to soften, rewards a long decant, and by critical consensus has decades ahead of it.
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.
