More reserved than the Richebourg and Romanée-St-Vivant, the 2016 La Tâche Grand Cru unwinds in the glass with aromas of wild berries, licorice, rose petal, smoked duck and love, framed by a touch of cedary new oak. On the palate, the wine is full-bodied, rich and velvety, with a deep, concentrated but tight-knit core, its firm chassis of fine-grained, structuring tannins cloaked in succulent fruit, underpinned by juicy acids. The finish is long and reverberative. This is a stunning La Tâche in the making, but it is also one of the more reticent wines in the range and will demand some bottle age.

The 2016 La Tâche Grand Cru was picked on 24 and 25 September at 31 hectoliters per hectare, the highest yields in this vintage. It has a profound and complex bouquet: blackberry and raspberry fruit intermingling with loam, iris and a strong estuarine influence, beautifully defined and mercurial as it always is in barrel. The palate is very refined on the entry: precise red and black fruit dissected by a killer line of acidity. This is a typically multifaceted and labyrinthine La Tâche with stunning delineation on the finish. I am absolutely fascinated to see how this turns out in bottle and hope/dream that I can find out many times over.

Vines aged 51 years. 31 hl/ha. Harvested 24–25 September. Bottled April/May 2018. 1,814 dozen produced. Lightish ruby. Gorgeously scented with the most seductive, intense and lightly spicy dark-red fruit. A little more spice here. And something almost dusty – a dry mineral note that is tangled up with a hint of vanilla and sweet spice. The tannins are compact, firm, dry but paper-fine and many layered. Amazing density and fewer aromatic signs of whole-bunch. Deep and more savoury as it builds in the mouth. It is not so much long as increasingly present after you have no more wine in your mouth, like a presence that remains after someone has left the room. (JH)