Château Léoville Poyferré, 2ème Cru Classé, St Julien, 2020
There’ll be a commemorative bottle to celebrate the 100th year of Cuvelier family ownership of Leoville Poyferre, and haven’t they brought up their hundred in style. The 2020 is deeply impressive, a great big slab of wine with a brooding bouquet of clay and minerals. It feels potent and powerful yet it is encased in beautifully fine, nuanced tannins. On the palate there is an impressive creaminess and intensity, pure dark fruited, laced with flecks of minerals, spices and liquorice with an undercurrent of crème de cassis. It stains the palate with menthol, spice and cinnamon, there is so much concentration and depth, then the imperious tannins grip the mouth. They are grand-scale, but ripe and detailed – a profound and very well judged Poyferre, which takes 2020 to the very limit. 64% Cabernet Sauvignon, 31% Merlot, 3% Cabernet Franc and 2% Petit Verdot.
critic reviews
The 2020 Léoville Poyferré is quite backward on the nose, gradually unfurling with aeration to reveal introspective black fruit, licorice and touches of bay leaf. Returning after 20 minutes the aromatics develop life-affirming pixelation. The palate is medium-bodied with fine delineation—very pure and silky in terms of texture. This is lavished in some high-quality new oak, but there is plenty of fruit underneath. It will take several years to fully cohere, but it should be worth waiting for. This is stunning. Tasted blind at the annual Southwold tasting.
The 2020 Leoville Poyferre is deep purple-black in color. Gregarious scents of redcurrant jelly, kirsch, and warm cassis prance out of the glass, leading to subtle nuances of wild sage, graphite, damp soil, and crushed rocks, before giving glimpses of a gorgeous underlying perfume of lilacs, lavender, and cinnamon stick. The fantastically vivacious, medium-bodied palate vibrates with amazing energy, delivering crunchy red and black fruit layers, framed by firm, fine-grained tannins and a racy backbone, finishing long and perfumed. Exquisitely graceful with a natural beauty, this is a real head-turner!
A rich, powerful wine, the 2020 Leoville Poyferre offers up aromas of sweet berries, blueberry liqueur, exotic spices, incense and creamy new oak. Full-bodied, broad and layered, it's deep and concentrated, its ample core of fruit only partially concealing a hefty payload of sweet, powdery, generously extracted tannin. Poyferre is generally the most flamboyant and demonstrative of the three Leovilles, but in 2020, it's chunkier, broader shouldered and more brooding than usual.