Château-Ausone St. Emilion 2010

A big, bold wine with unbelievable power and concentration. Low yields and a dominance of Cabernet Franc have produced an immensely concentrated wine. Still very young, this magnificent wine holds the promise of great aging.

Deep, saturated ruby-red. Musky aromas of black cherry, black raspberry, coffee, violet, Christmas spices, minerals and exotic oak, complicated by graphite minerality. Boasts uncanny intensity, calcaire energy and power on the palate, but there's also a deeply creamy texture brought by this superripe vintage. Boasts extraordinary inner-mouth aromatic character and finishes with great tannic spine. The building, endless finish boasts great clarity and perfume. A transcendent Ausone in its combination of power and elegance. This stunning wine will be improving in bottle long after I've expired.

The 2010 Ausone struck me as another brilliant, potentially perfect wine, which should come as no shock to people who have been following Vauthier's work over the last decade or more. Backward and intense, this wine offers up notes of crushed chalk/rock mineralilty interwoven with blueberry, black raspberry and cassis as well as some graphite and vanillin. It is incredibly rich but at the same time precise, fresh and vivacious. This is a super wine, but it will require enormous patience from its potential suitors. Forget it for a decade and drink it over the following 50+ years.

Very sappy and intense, offering racy red licorice, red currant and violet notes, with nice taut acidity and a long, minerally finish. Combines power and austerity, with excellent drive. For those who like backbone in their wines.