Tasting Notes and Scores
An intriguing perfume filled with stone, flowers, blackberry liqueur, dark plums, licorice, smoke, oak and hints of bitter chocolate, asks and receives your attention. Lush, sensuous, silk and velvet drenched fruit drenched with opulence that borders on decadence coat your palate. The pure, intense, sensuous finish lasts at least 60 seconds. This sublime Bordeaux wine has become a better tasting experience since last tasted.
Jeff Leve
The stellar Cheval Blanc 2010 has a very precise bouquet, not powerful but exuding a brooding intensity. It is very well defined with hints of honey and dried violet petals in the background. The palate is medium-bodied with a wondrous spicy entry, perfectly judged acidity, real weight and heft on the back palate that fans out as if there is no tomorrow. This is a huge wine, totally compelling, a behemoth destined to mature over years rather than decades. Tasted January 2014.
– eRobertParker.com, Mar 2014
Neal Martin
This is stone-cold shut down right now, but why worry? You'll want to wait at least a decade before breaching a bottle as massively endowed as this, with loads of loamy bass notes thumping along underneath a riveting track of licorice snap, pastis-steeped black currant fruit, maduro tobacco and espresso. And then there's an echo of petrichor at the very end that hints at the aromatic fireworks to come with cellaring. Should compete for wine of the vintage. JM
Wine Spectator
Quality 984 | Brand 995 | Economics 932 |
buzz brand
Quality: Predicted life of 21 years, one of the longest drinking windows in its peer group for the 2010 vintage, which averages 13 years
Brand: Strong restaurant presence, featuring on 40 of the world's top wine lists, including Garibaldi
Economics: More traded at auction than its peers, its top 5 vintages having seen 2,982 75cl equivalent bottles traded in the past year
Production: Lower yields than its peer group average of 33 hl/ha
- www.wine-lister.com June 2017
Wine Lister
Good bright, deep red. Captivating scents of cassis, violet, minerals, bitter chocolate and wild herbs. Extremely fine-grained but also very dense and chewy for young Cheval Blanc, showing great cabernet franc lift and perfume and a downright velvety texture. This deep, multilayered wine was a bit dominated by its brooding tannins and big structure when first poured, but I found my score going steadily higher as the wine benefited from air. My rating may look too conservative a decade from now--or three or four decades hence.
Wine Independent
Showing even better than a bottle a few years ago, the 2010 Cheval Blanc is perfection in a glass and wine doesn’t get any better. As with the 2009, it’s a powerful, concentrated Cheval Blanc, yet it has a slightly dark, cooler profile in its smoky black fruits, graphite, new leather, crushed rocks and cured meat aromas and flavors. Where the 2009 hits the palate with a sunny, sexy style, this stays more inward and masculine, yet it still has incredible sweetness of fruit, flawless integration of its fruit, tannins, and acidity, a great mid-palate, and a finish that goes on for over a minute. It opens up with time in the glass and offers incredible pleasure today, with an exotic masculine yet sexy style, but feel free to enjoy this legendary wine any time over the coming 3-4 decades.
Jeb Dunnuck
The aromas here are crazy with flowers, mushroom, forest floor, and fruit. It seems like I am walking through a row of the vines in Cheval Blanc when I have my nose in the glass. It's full-bodied, with fabulous layers of ultra-fine tannins and milk chocolate, raspberries, and a phenomenal finish. Truly one of the greatest Chevals ever. Better than 2009. Try in 2020.
– jamessuckling.com, Nov 2013
James Suckling
Deep garnet in color and made of 54% Cabernet Franc and 46% Merlot, the nose of the 2010 Cheval Blanc is a bit subdued to begin, measuredly opening out to reveal achingly provocative notions of molten chocolate, preserved Morello cherries, baked blackberries, boysenberries and blueberry compote with wafts of underbrush, cigar box, cumin seed and sandalwood. Full-bodied, the palate is a full-on atomic bomb waiting to go off, with very tightly coiled, slowly maturing black fruits eking out glimpses of a vast array of nuances. Still very youthful, it finishes with an incredibly persistent, jaw-dropping display of earth and mineral fireworks. I’d leave this one for another 5 years and drink it over the next 50. LPB
The 2010 is one of the most impressive two-year-old Cheval Blancs I have tasted in 34 years in this profession. The final blend of 54% Cabernet Franc and 46% Merlot has the tell-tale berry/floral nose with subtle hints of menthol, blueberry, raspberry and flowers in addition to some forest floor and a delicate touch of lead pencil shavings. The wine exhibits more structure and density than it did from barrel, and it was already remarkable then. The foresty/floral notes seem to linger and linger in this surprisingly full-bodied, powerful Cheval Blanc, yet it possesses a very healthy pH that should ensure enormous longevity. Dense purple in color, and a bigger, richer wine than usual, this is one Cheval Blanc that will probably need a decade of cellaring. I like the description from the estate’s administrator, Pierre Lurton, who said it tasted like “liquid cashmere,” a perfect expression, despite the wine’s structure and intensity. This is another 50-year wine from this amazingly structured, rich vintage.
Robert Parker (Wine Advocate #205, Feb 2013)
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