Château Smith Haut-Lafitte 2005

The 2005 vintage in Pessac-Léognan

Vintage benchmark: 97/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: Drought without any halt in ripening, together with cool nights, gave a legendary vintage: concentrated, with firm tannins and very long aging potential.

Overall reading of the year’s season across Pessac-Léognan. An estate can depart from it sharply, in frost or hail years, where two neighbours did not make the same vintage. What this particular wine actually gave is on its technical sheet and in the scores above.

Tasting

Floral, tobacco, sweet spice mingled with black fruit; the density on the palate is not at odds with the elegance; small, round, silky tannins; a wine that is direct, sinewy, without the little hollows or peaks of harshness of years gone by. The best Smith we have tasted, and no doubt a kind of culmination for those who reinvented this cru.

Blend of the 2005 vintage

Figures from the 2005 sheet

• 13 % vol.Alcohol
• 30 hl/haYield
• 38 yrsVine age
• 120,000 bottlesProduction

Winemaking

As whole berries with punching down in wooden vats: 28-30°C.

Ageing

18 months in barrel (80% new oak, from our own in-house cooperage), ageing on lees, a single racking, then ageing lot by lot.

Terroir

The terroir has such a strong personality that it gave the region its name: "Les Graves". These graves are an accumulation of alluvial, sandy and stony deposits laid down on a Tertiary limestone subsoil by the turbulent rivers and glaciers of the early Quaternary era, subsequently reshaped into gravel rises by erosion. At Smith Haut Lafitte, the soil is made up of one of the rare Günzian gravel rises, thick and ochre in colour, a sign of its richness in iron oxide. This soil is of high quality for viticulture because it is at once free-draining, very poor and warm at the surface, while maintaining a degree of coolness and moisture at depth (clay or limestone).