Tasted at BI Wine & Spirits' 10-Years-On tasting, the 2007 Leoville-Barton is more vigorous and fruit-driven than the Langoa, with gorgeous dark berry fruit, wilted rose petals and orange blossom scents that really blossom in the glass. The palate is medium-bodied with a sensual, quite rounded opening that belies the structure of this Leoville Barton, armed with black pepper and cedar towards the long finish. This is a Saint Julien that has always threatened to come good and at ten years of age, and it is beginning to take flight. A couple of cases of this in your cellar and you cannot go wrong. Tasted February 2017.

This muscular, highly-extracted, structured 2007 reveals a boatload of tannin (unusual for this vintage). The wine’s dark ruby/purple color is followed by aromas of cassis, new saddle leather, and forest floor offered in a structured, backward, almost unapproachable format. Give it 2-3 years of cellaring, and if the tannins resolve themselves, it will merit a higher score. It should last for 12-20 years.

Intense black-red, restrained but well-expressed concentration of fruit, a little spice and more going on than most other wines, good depth, personality and precision of fruit, good future.