The 1986 Leoville-Las Cases is still so youthful in appearance after 30 years, with only a thin bricking on the rim giving away its age. The bouquet is magnificent: extraordinarily pure and delineated, bewitching black fruit laced with cedar and graphite, the latter lending an almost Pauillac-like personality. The palate is exactly as I have found the previous dozen or so bottles I have tasted: structured, delineated, intense, aristocratic and imperious. It is less formidable than say, ten years ago, so it has probably just stepped onto its drinking plateau. The acidity is perfectly judged lending freshness and tension, crucial to counterbalance those layers of spicy black fruit that fans out with cedar and graphite (again) towards the finish. You come away with the feeling of having consumed a wine with immense energy, yet with so much more to give over the next three decades, and knowing this property, perhaps even the three decades after that! I would agree with the late Michel Delon: the 1986 Léoville Las-Cases is the summit of the 1980s. Tasted September 2016. - Neal Martin

For the last two decades I have been perplexed by this wine. In that time it has not moved an inch. It is a wine that, on occasion, can show it’s promise but generally mains strictly behind closed doors. The colour is the first indicator, it looks like a five-year-old wine. The nose is phenomenally concentrated but gives off very little other than ultra primary black fruit and a touch of cedar. The palate is wonderfully smooth and phenomenally dense. This is an absolute tour de force of a wine that doesn't yet deliver the hedonistic pleasure that I hope one day it might. There is little doubt that all the elements are there for a legendary wine… I just hope I'm still around to see it if and when it finally opens up.

One of the wines of the vintage, the wine is ready for drinking. That being said, regardless of how long you decant the wine. there is no avoiding the stern, hard nature of the vintage. Full-bodied, concentrated and with soaring aromatics, the wine offers up a chewy, intense, rough and ready blast of ripe cassis. 96 Points Read more at:https://www.thewinecellarinsider.com/wine-tasting-note/?vintage=1986&wine=Chateau%20Leoville%20Las%20Cases

Firm and focused with beautifully articulated currant raspberry and nutmeg aromas and flavors; very supple for such a lean-textured Bordeaux. Approaching drinkability but it can use until 2000 to soften.--Léoville Las Cases vertical. (HS)