Château Troplong Mondot

James Suckling 97-98:"The focus to this wine sets a new standard for Troplong Mondot with density and minerality that I have not encountered for decades. Lots of slate and white-pepper character. Tight and very dense. Full body. Balanced. Wild mineral character and freshness here. Precise." jamessuckling.com 04.2019 // WineSpectator 95-98: "This offers a lovely display of boysenberry, cherry and plum fruit, yet stays refined and focused, relying on purity as this glides through. Has weight but feels silky, with a flinty mineral hint adding cut on the finish" winespectator.com 04.2019 // Lisa Perrotti-Brown 93-95+: "The 2018 Troplong Mondot is blended of 85% Merlot, 13% Cabernet Sauvignon and 2% Cabernet Franc, with 14.5% alcohol and a pH of 3.56. Deep garnet-purple in color, it begins slowly with bold, bright black raspberries, ripe black plums, fresh blackberries and Morello cherries notes, giving way to underlying scents of tobacco, wild sage, Sichuan pepper, black olives, truffles and Marmite toast with hints of crushed stones and iron ore. Medium to full-bodied, the palate offers wonderfully fresh, energetic black fruit with a downright racy line of freshness (uncommon for this vintage) and firm, rounded tannins, finishing long with lots of mineral, earth and dried herbs layers giving beautiful electric sparks. It’s always difficult to know how people are going to respond to change. There are those that embrace change for the sake of it, others who run for the comfort and safety of the familiar. And there are a lot of folks who use change to validate their own views, for or against. Aymeric de Gironde was the talk of Saint-Émilion last September, when his pickers marched into the vineyards on September 7th and began harvesting. It was a good week before anyone else was ready to even think about picking. There was no rain on the horizon. Was he insane? This was Troplong Mondot, after all. That’s right: big, rich, so-ripe-you-could-stand-a-spoon-up-in-it Troplong Mondot. He may have just come from some chichi glitzy château over in the Médoc, but who did he think he was? “If you pick early, you can get precision and the aromatic typicity of this region,” de Gironde told me. “We began picking on September 7th, and 70% of the harvest was done in a week and a half. Then we waited about a month for the Cabernets. This year was a question of choices. Not every year do you have the choice of what to do. This year we could make a choice based on our beliefs. I was looking for purity of aromatics. I was a little afraid because the skins were quite thick. I think I could have waited until Christmas and they wouldn’t have moved. During the growing season, we kept a lot of leaf canopy to protect the grapes from the sun. There was nearly no de-leafing this year. We did very little green harvesting. We left a lot of grapes on the vine. And then in the winery we used no SO2 until the wine was put into barrel. This was scary because you have to protect against oxygen, but I think it worked this year.” I had, of course, heard most of this through the rumor mill before I visited Troplong Mondot to taste the 2018. So, I was prepared. Nonetheless, it was a bit like meeting up with a friend a year later and seeing that they’d lost 80 pounds and chopped their waist-long hair into a pixie. It’s still your friend, but oh man have they changed! robertparker.com 04.2018