This wine shows Latour in its latter stages of life: the fruit was still lingering, but it had definitely given up centre stage to secondary characters of earth, sweet spice, leather and something slightly vegetal. By no means the worse for this, a very pleasant bottle – but these definitely need drinking up.

Robert Parker's Wine Advocate 26/06/2000
I have consumed over a case of this wine, and consistently rated it in the mid to upper-nineties. The three bottles from the Chateau''s cellars were variable, but seemed surprisingly herbal, with notes of soy, cedar, roasted vegetables, leather, and earth dominating the wine''s fruit. Tasty, elegant, medium-bodied, and fully mature, the 1970 is excellent, but not inspirational.

A bottle from my cellar drunk in late December, 1999, was rated 97.

It appeared to have at least two decades of life remaining. Readers who purchase old vintages of great wines, regardless of whether they are Bordeaux, Burgundy, and California Cabernet, need to remember the expression, "there are no great wines, just great bottles," particularly after a wine reaches 30 years of age.

One of the top two or three wines of the vintage (Petrus and Trotanoy are noteworthy rivals), this young, magnificent Latour is still 5-10 years away from full maturity. The opaque garnet color is followed by a huge, emerging nose of black fruits, truffles, walnuts, and subtle tobacco/Graves-like scents. Full-bodied, fabulously concentrated and intense, with a sweet inner-core of fruit (a rarity in most 1970 Medocs), and high but well-integrated tannin, this enormously endowed, massive Latour should hit its prime by the end of the century and last for 2-3 decades thereafter. This is will be the longest-lived and potentially most classic wine of the vintage. Cream always comes to the top. (98)