2024 Chateau Marquis de Terme 4eme Cru Classe, Margaux

Slim and supple, savoury blue fruits, shot through with campfire and liquorice, crayon and roses, well handled in the vintage. Good Margaux typicity and has ageing ability in the mid term. Harvest 25 September to 4 October. 40% new oak. Now including the vines from Château Marojallia, but also reducing the percentage of 1st wine overall, so really focusing on the best plots.

Blackcurrants, flowers, cherries, espresso, and cigar box aromatics are already expressive. The wine is soft, seductive, and forward, with a core of plummy fruits with touches of spice, and mint in the mid-palate, and in the finish. The wine blends 60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 38% Merlot, and 2% Petit Verdot. Drink from 2028-2045.

The 2024 Marquis de Terme is elegant, perfumed and nicely lifted. Crushed flowers, mint, spice, red cherry, cinnamon and rose petal lend attractive aromatic presence. This mid-weight, gracious Margaux is impeccably done. It’s the sort of wine that is not trying to be anything more than was possible in this vintage. A burst of fruit punctuates the finish. Tasted three times.

A wine that, in a way, is almost flattered by the vintage – which seems like an odd thing to say. That said, I can't help but feel as though the extraction has been pushed just a touch further than would have been my preference in the search for more volume in the mouth. That, for me, comes at the expense of delineation and detail, rendering the fruit a little less precise. Tasted a second time, I find more clarity and precision on the attack and the front of the palate, but it still loses a little of its shape in the mouth towards the finish. But the floral aromatics are enticing and even if the wood will take a little longer to be fully integrated it reinforces that florality and with it the Margaux typicity of this wine.

The 2024 Marquis de Terme comes across as sultry and lacks the fruit intensity of its peers at the moment, though it is delineated and fresh with no green traits. The palate is medium-bodied with grainy tannins, a bit more rustic than other Margaux wines but solid with a cohesive cedar-infused finish. Fine.

60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 38% Merlot and 2% Petit Verdot. Cask sample. Reserved nose. Firm extract and tannins. Tight and uncompromising at the moment. Will need retasting at a later stage. (JL)