Château d'Yquem 2015

Critic scores

• James Suckling99-100
• Wine Advocate99
• Vinous98
• Wine Spectator98
• Wine Enthusiast97
• Decanter95

The 2015 vintage in Sauternes

Vintage benchmark: 93/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A dry September curbed botrytis: rich, sun-drenched wines, broader than taut.

Overall reading of the year’s season across Sauternes. 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.

Figures from the 2015 sheet

• 100,000 bottlesProduction

Winemaking

Fermentation takes place in barrels in order to promote the perfect conduct of this phase, the most delicate and mysterious of wine production.

Ageing

30 months in barrels

Terroir

Here, in a rare alchemy, all the favourable elements of the Sauternais come together. The soils, warm and quick-drying at the surface, benefit from the heat stored by the large gravel stones. They also hold good water reserves owing to the clay nature of their lower layers. Many springs indeed come to the surface, and the control of the soil's water regime long ago prompted the installation of drainage. The great extent of Yquem has made it possible to plant the vineyard across a very wide range of the geological mosaic of the Sauternais. The extraordinary variety of soils that results is a fundamental element in the final complexity of the wine of Yquem.