Château Latour
Pauillac 1987

When you tell your friends that you love wine, don't they tend to ask you which one is the best you've ever had? My answer is Latour '82. The label shown above is that of '87, which I drunk on the same day as '82.

After I finished the ninety-ninth bottle since I started keeping my wine diary, I wondered what to drink next. It's gonna be the 100th, maybe I should try something great... Yes, I've got Latour '87. Thus I decided what to drink. And I needed a companion (this idea too often turns out to be a wrong choice, but in this case, it was correct). So I brought my bottle of Latour to a bar in my neighbourhood, namely Post Coitus. There I found a couple I had known for some time. They are great manias for wine, and were having La Dame de Montrose '93. They offered me a glass. I had tasted it myself a couple of days ago, so I knew it was good.

After that, we had Latour '87. It was superb, even if not the best Latour could ever achieve. It has a structure, very dense, but very well-balanced. It even had fruity sweetness in the finish.

When we were about to finish the bottle, the owner of the place, who was having Montrose and Latour with us, said that he had Latour '82 and that it was that couple that gave it to him. So went on to Latour '82. '82 is an incredible wine. It is at the same time more delicate and even more powerful than '87. Tannic taste had become very round, but the wine tasted still very lively, perhaps thanks to its acid. If so-called “fruity” wines, such as Beaujolais or Chianti, are in one extreme, surely Latour is in the other. But still you know in your mouth that it's made of grape.