Chateau d'Yquem 2021 – Dreamy… Dynamic. (100) JAMES SUCKLING
Extremely limited offer

How do you describe Chateau d’Yquem? Liquid Gold? Perhaps just simply the best sweet wine in the world? For it is the best, quite clearly, and by a long way. No other Sauternes possesses the power, the concentration, the sheer depth of character. The others do not achieve the weight, the richness or the lusciousness of Yquem, the combination of ripe fruit and delicious fresh acidity which gives Yquem the balance to match its breed. CLIVE COATES, The Finest Chateau of Bordeaux


Yquem, Château d’, the greatest wine of sauternes and, according to the famous 1855 classification, of the entire bordeaux region. It is sweet, golden, and apparently almost immortal. JANCIS ROBINSON MW

2021 SAUTERNES VINTAGE

Sauternes ‘utterly brilliant’ but tiny quantities. For, both miraculously and yet even more poignantly in a way, the wines themselves – where there is one – are utterly brilliant. They have been produced in incredibly tiny quantities, but they are in their way undoubtedly the wines of this vintage. COLIN HAY, Drinks Business


Extremely high quality and pathetically low quantity JANCIS ROBINSON MW 

 

There is only one d’Yquem!


In my mind everyone who truly loves wine, for those who consider wine to be more than just a drink, people who look for something genuinely special in a glass, then there are few producers who can compare to the wines produced from this hallowed site. 


Lots of us will never get the chance to taste d’Yquem. Fewer still will get to see a bottle in its prime. Even less a bottle from a vintage that is considered perfect by some. I have been very fortunate over my time in the trade to have drunk a significant amount of these wines (not bragging, just for some context). While I have other producers who I would buy and who I recommend to everyone who will listen, there is only one d’Yquem!


As with DRC in Burgundy, Lafitte in Bordeaux, Egon Muller in the Mosel, Selosse in Champagne, Giacomo Conterno in Barolo, there are some producers around the world that are the reference point for style and quality and who have the track record to support their truly iconic status. In Sauternes that wine is unquestionably d’Yquem. One of greatest vinous experiences any human can hope for.  


I have to say, my top ten Sauternes of all time have been d’Yquem, easily. I would need to really stop and consider where the rest sit, many that approach the best of d’Yquem. Some that are its equal in quality, but there is more to this wine than just the factors we assign that determine quality. There is that thing, that magic, that wow, the X factor, the fairy dust, that you only see in this estate, with any regularity. 


When I talk about other Sauternes, I love I refer to them as things like “the most finessed” or “the most sophisticated” maybe “the most exotic”. With d’Yquem it is simply all of those things and more. It is Chateau d'Yquem! 

That is what makes this wine so magical, it combines the best elements possible in a sweet wine of this style and it delivers it in an incomparable fashion. Simultaneously vivid, uplifting, uber fresh, powerful, muscular, unctuous, light, fine, concentrated, deep, reserved and entrancing. Please let me know if I missed any obvious descriptors there. 

You can essentially throw whatever terms you like at a great bottle of d’Yquem as it behaves in ways others do not. To have a wine this powerful, concentrated and massive in dimension that always seems to remain so precise and with such clean-cut lines, is the kind of paradoxical praise you can really only apply to the greatest wines on earth, of which this is most definitely one. Enormous in scale and yet seemingly light on its feet. Hugely sweet/concentrated, yet clean and clear. How they achieve this is something that can only be due to the vineyard imprint.

I, like many before me, fail to really encapsulate all that makes this wine so exciting, what gives it that mythical air and otherworldly aura. Tasting notes rarely do them justice, d'Yquem operates in a different realm than the majority of its competitors. 

I guess you will need to grab some for yourself and find out.