Château Léoville-Las-Cases has triumphed in 2012. It borders Château Latour geographically and for me this northernmost St Julien is better than the Pauillac first growth this year. It is a great effort. In the glass there is no trace of the difficult vintage that produced this wine. Clos du Maquis looks very good too, lots of blackcurrant and cassis tones [it is 92% Cabernet] it has a solid structure but nicely ripe tannin. If the price is right this wine is really worth considering. Le Petit Lion du Marquis de Las Cases, the second wine of Las-Cases, is attractive and supple.

Even in the most consistent year a Bordeaux vintage is complex. 2012 is far from a consistent year. Poor weather caused uneven flowering at the start of the growing cycle, this led to great variation in ripening, and after what eventually proved a hot and dry summer, vintage rain caused difficulties. It’s a vintage that is heterogeneous in a great many places, especially on the Left Bank. One thing is not in any doubt, however. The vintage has produced Merlot of considerable beauty and it is the quality of this variety that stuck in the mind during Primeurs week.

St Julien has made an extremely serious fist of 2010. It’s the polar opposite of 2009 and possesses a weight, density and integrity all of its own. It feels like a hypothetical blend here of 2005 and 2000 with a bit of 1986 thrown in, though far better handled in the vineyard and in the cellar than ’86 was in those days. Now in bottle, these wines mean business, and you’ll be keeping them there a while. They need ten years age minimum, twenty at the top level, but at maturity they have the potential to be remarkable. If 2009 is considered a latter day 1959, then, in time, could 2010 be the 1961 of its generation?

Great vintages are consistent from cask, to bottle, to glass, and so it is proving with Bordeaux 2010. Tasting this vintage at the Union des Grand Crus de Bordeaux’s annual horizontal at Covent Garden last November there is no doubt that 2010, now in bottle, is delivering on the exceptional promise it showed during the Bordeaux primeurs week in April 2011. It remains a fascinating vintage and a wonderful partner to 2009. If the precocious and deceptively easy charms of the extraordinary 2009 vintage appeal to the heart, then 2010 is definitely a vintage for the head.