Château Smith Haut-Lafitte 2008

The 2008 vintage in Pessac-Léognan

Vintage benchmark: 91/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A bright late season saved a cool summer: wines of unexpected freshness and aromatic precision.

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

The wine has a very dark red colour. The nose is expressive and very complex, revealing notes of black and red fruit (cherry, blackcurrant), notes of smoke, flint, liquorice and clove spice. The palate is broad and dense, with a lovely frame of velvety tannins, then opens onto a lovely balance where concentration is balanced by aromatic harmony. One then finds again these spiced notes of clove, blackcurrant and liquorice, but also these gunflint notes from our graves terroir. This 2008 vintage is unquestionably a powerful, concentrated, balanced and silky wine with good ageing potential.

Blend of the 2008 vintage

Figures from the 2008 sheet

• 13 % vol.Alcohol
• 25 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).