Chateau Belair-Monange Premier Grand Cru Classe B, Saint-Emilion Grand Cru 2016

Incredibly perfumed aromas of roses and violets, as well as blue fruit and lavender. Full-bodied and powerful, yet so full of finesse and vibrance. The height of elegance! Such depth of chalk and dark berries. It goes on for minutes. Drink after 2025.

Deep garnet in color, the 2016 Belair-Monange slowly drifts out of the glass to offer gorgeous scents of black raspberries, boysenberry preserves, and baked plums, plus suggestions of Indian spices, sandalwood, and dried mint with a hint of crushed rocks. The palate is rich and full-bodied, delivering mouth-filling black fruits and exotic spice layers with a velvety texture and seamless freshness, finishing very long and perfumed.

Slate and pumice stone, crushed rose petals and juicy black cherry, this is exceptional, just a delicious vintage where the new vineyard configuration of Bélair-Monange was starting to come into its own. Look out for this wine - definitely entering its drinking window but with decades ahead.

The 2016 Château Belair-Monange (92% Merlot and 8% Cabernet Franc) comes from limestone soils on both the upper plateau and the hillside slope just outside of the village of Saint Emilion. This deep, saturated purple-hued effort offers a more primordial style in its ripe black fruits, toasty oak, espresso bean, and spring flower-scented aromas and flavors. With full-bodied richness, solid acidity, terrific purity, and rock-solid underlying structure, this beautiful Saint Emilion needs 4-5 years of bottle age and will keep for two decades. It opens up nicely with time in the glass, so if you feel like drinking a bottle soon, give it a healthy decant.

The 2016 Belair-Monangé displays almost clinical precision on a nose of mineral-rich black cherry and raspberry fruit, plus hints of wilted violets and iris. The medium-bodied palate delivers firm grip on the entry. This is a clean, precise, correct Saint-Émilion with plenty of tension and poise toward the persistent finish. Very classy and noble. Tasted blind at the annual Southwold tasting.

The 2016 Bélair-Monange is exotically ripe and flashy. Bright red and purplish fruit is pushed forward in a primary, intense wine with plenty of immediacy. As good as the 2016 is, what I don't see are the layers of depth and structure that have made the finest recent vintages so compelling. Even so, the 2016 is a very pretty and compelling wine, it just falls a bit short relative to some of the other wines that have been made here.