Bordeaux 2025: Château Grand Puy Lacoste

GLORIOUS GPL

Xavier Borie’s Grand Puy Lacoste is a longtime J&B favourite. We love this classical Pauillac for its floral charms and sumptuous, ravishing fruit. The 2025 is business as usual: gloriously fragrant aromas, an elaborate palate of just-ripe berries and minerals, all supported by caressing tannins. This consummate Pauillac is one of the most vibrant and charming wines of the vintage – a wine that will delight and captivate the senses for many decades.

We can also offer the excellent Lacoste Borie 2025, Xavier’s “Park Wine” at £ per six. Both are available in “Variation” cases, which include one double magnum, two magnums and four standard bottles. To mark the inaugural vintage produced in the new, state-of-the-art winery, the 2025 Grand Puy Lacoste will be presented in a striking, all-black silkscreen bottle.

CRITICS' NOTES

“The 2025 Grand-Puy-Lacoste is the first to be made in the new gravity-fed winery. It was picked between September 4 and 18 at 30 hl/ha, much lower than normal, with a high percentage of Cabernet Sauvignon (76%). Matured in 65% new oak, it has a perfumed bouquet with blackberry and raspberry fruit, touches of graphite emerging with aeration, beautifully defined. The palate is medium-bodied with edgy tannins. Definitely one of the most refined GPLs that I have tasted at this stage, very harmonious, complex and engaging. Superb persistence on the finish, this is a complete Pauillac that is going to give immense pleasure. 2032 – 2060”

94-96/100

Neal Martin, vinous.com

“The 2025 Grand-Puy-Lacoste reveals a classic, refined bouquet of cassis, dark berries, cedar and lead pencil, with discreet floral nuances. Medium- to full-bodied, structured and precise, it’s built around a well-defined core of fruit framed by finely grained, youthful, filigreed tannins with a tensile profile. Less demonstrative than some of its peers in Pauillac, it privileges balance and typicity over sheer power, concluding with a long, elegant and mineral finish. Produced from a blend of 76% Cabernet Sauvignon and 24% Merlot, this is the first vintage vinified in the estate’s new gravity-fed cellar, enabling more precise parcel selection—an evolution that appears to reinforce the wine’s precision and coherence.”

95-97/100 Yohan Castaing, The Wine Advocate

“Excellent GPL, medium- to full-bodied with a great expression of dark fruit that is evenly distributed. It’s fresh and precise with grainy, integrated tannins that should only integrate more. A blend of 76% cabernet sauvignon and 24% merlot.”

96-97/100 James Suckling, jamessuckling.com

“Vibrant, in the spirit of the 2025 vintage, cloves, capsicum, blueberry and cassis fruits, plenty of delicious texture, lovely sappy and bright juice, firm tannins, appellation typicity, crayon and mint leaf. First year for the new cellar. 65% new oak for ageing. 2036-2055.”

94/100 Jane Anson, janeanson.com