Château Smith Haut-Lafitte 2025

Critic scores

• Jeb Dunnuck97-99
• Vinous95-97

The 2025 vintage in Pessac-Léognan

Vintage benchmark: 94/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A dry, bright summer, tempered by cool nights, gave pure, balanced wines, more classic than sun-drenched.

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

“This wine has a deep, dark red robe. The first nose reveals a lovely freshness of fresh fruit: red fruit (cherry, raspberry), black fruit (wild blackberry) and a touch of blackcurrant. On aeration, the wine reveals its enormous aromatic potential, with these notes of fresh fruit but also more delicate notes of flowers (peony), sweet spice (fennel seed, star anise, fenugreek, mountain hay...), then another, darker dimension appears: graphite, pencil lead, with a scent of warm earth, offering superb complexity.

The attack on the palate is surprisingly fresh, with a lovely soft, caressing texture. This opening of the palate is all softness and delicacy, then the palate gains amplitude, with contained power and a lovely frame. It is centred, full, dense, with lovely length and superb harmony. A balanced wine, with great precision, lovely freshness and superb energy. On the palate one finds the complexity of the nose again, with crisp fruit, very delicate floral notes and spice that enchant the finish.

A very fine vintage from Château Smith Haut Lafitte, one that will rank among the estate's benchmark wines.”

Blend of the 2025 vintage

Figures from the 2025 sheet

• 28 hl/haYield
• 49 yrsVine age

Winemaking

After a double sorting, before and after destemming, the grapes are vinified as whole berries, with partial use of whole clusters. Extraction is carried out through gentle punching down and/or pump-overs. Long macerations continue at 26-28°C, with a duration adapted to each tank in order to preserve the wine's balance and precision.

Ageing

18 months in barrels (50% new barrels made in our own in-house cooperage), ageing on lees, a single racking, then ageing adjusted for each wine.

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).