Chateau Mouton Rothschild 2016
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Product Details
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Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
The wine is a dark and intense cherry red. The highly refined nose reveals perfectly ripe fruit. Ripe bilberry and blackcurrant aromas combine harmoniously with floral notes. With airing, the nose unfolds on pepper and spice balanced by elegant notes of graphite and blonde tobacco, bringing charm and nobility to an extensive range of aromas. The full and dense attack exhibits exceptionally well-rounded and silky tannins. The ample mid-palate abounds in black fruit along with cocoa flavours and biscuity notes, leading into a full-bodied and remarkably persistent finish, the sign of a great vintage.
Blend: 83% Cabernet Sauvignon, 15% Merlot, 1% Cabernet Franc and 1% Petit Verdot
About the Label Artwork
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955, William Kentridge is the first world-famous artist from the African continent to illustrate a Mouton label. The eclectic nature of his studies, combining political science with fine arts and theatre, is reflected in the variety of his tastes and talents. Having started out as an actor and stage director in his home city, to which he has remained faithfully attached, he soon turned to animated drawing and video while refining the technique that would make him famous: charcoal drawings or black-card cutouts projected or stuck on various surfaces, with movement being rendered by the superposition of successive phases. Frequently drawing inspiration from dark times in his country’s recent past, he asserts a “political art” that is nevertheless open to both humour and poetry.
A display of his work at the 1997 Kassel Documenta marked the starting point for many more exhibitions in prestigious venues ranging from the Venice and São Paulo Biennials, the Louvre in Paris to Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau, MoMA in New York and the Albertina in Vienna. His drawings, videos, sculptures, collages and performances have won numerous international awards, including Japan’s Kyoto Prize and Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award. At the same time he has maintained a brilliant career as an opera director and set designer in Europe and America. His work on Shostakovich’s The Nose, based on a short story by Gogol, was acclaimed from New York to the Aix-en-Provence Festival. More recently, his production The Head and the Load, about Africans who served in Europe during the First World War, was a huge success in London in 2018.
In his work for Mouton, Triumphs of Bacchus, the silhouettes he assembles in a joyful procession are inspired by Bacchic characters from the paintings of great masters from Titian to Matisse, underlining the truth that a great wine, although first and foremost a pleasure, is also inseparable from a cultural tradition which demands respect and moderation – not least Château Mouton Rothschild 2016!
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Dark ruby, purple color. Aromas of blackcurrants, black truffle, crushed stone, licorice and hints of tar. Full-bodied, deep and vertical on the palate, drawing you in and down. The structure is very tannic and powerful, yet the tannins are folded into the wine. One of the most powerful Moutons ever for me. Try after 2027.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Composed of 83% Cabernet Sauvignon, 15% Merlot, 1% Cabernet Franc and 1% Petit Verdot, the 2016 Mouton Rothschild has an opaque garnet-purple color. WOW—the nose explodes from the glass with powerful blackcurrant cordial, black raspberries, blueberry pie and melted chocolate notions, plus suggestions of aniseed, camphor, lifted kirsch and the faintest waft of a subtle floral perfume in the background. Full-bodied, concentrated, bold and totally seductive in the mouth, it has very fine-grained, silt-like tannins, while jam-packed with tightly wound fruit layers, finishing in this wonderful array of mineral sparks. Magic.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Along with the Château Lafite, the 2016 Château Mouton Rothschild is the wine of the vintage from the Médoc and is a truly profound, magical, blockbuster wine in every sense. It’s based on 83% Cabernet Sauvignon, 15% Merlot, and the rest Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot, raised in new French oak. Boasting a saturated purple color as well as an extraordinary bouquet of thick black fruits, lead pencil shavings, new saddle leather, and burning embers, with just a hint of its oak upbringing, this beauty hits the palate with a mammoth amount of fruit and texture yet stays fresh, pure, and light on its feet, with a thrilling sense of minerality as well as building tannins on the finish. It’s one of the most profound young wines I’ve ever tasted, and while it will probably keep for three-quarters of a decade, it offers pleasure even today. Bravo!
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Decanter
A higher level of acidity than is usual for Mouton is buttressed by waves of fruit and tannin. It's a modern take on 1986 that shows the most wonderful precision of creme caramel, liquorice, blackcurrant, creme de cassis and cedar. it's opulent but also has great tension through the palate - a monumental Mouton that for me has gained in stature over the past two years of ageing. The idea of a drinking window almost feels like a mirage - the perfect moment is likely to recede into the distance time and time again. It could be drunk in the next decade perhaps, but it's going to take 20 years or more to really get into its stride. Easily one of the wines of the vintage, for me this is showing even better than during en primeur. 1% Cabernet Franc completes the blend.
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Wine Enthusiast
The rich fruit in this wine nearly envelops the tannins. Flavors of black plums, blackberries and blueberries meld with intense acidity to mask the power and concentration of the polished tannins. With this structure, will age for many, many years. Do not drink before 2026.
Cellar Selection -
Wine Spectator
A generous, pure and lush ball of Cabernet, with wave after wave of unadulterated cassis and blackberry puree flavors rolling through. Features notes of roasted apple wood and sweet tobacco, offset by a long tug of sweet earth, but that’s all background music to the impressive core of fruit, which steams along like a cruise ship with enough stores in reserve to go around the world twice without stopping. Best from 2025 through 2045.
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A First Classified Growth, Château Mouton Rothschild spans 82 hectares (202 acres) of vines at Pauillac in the Médoc, planted with the classic varieties of the region: Cabernet Sauvignon (79%), Merlot (17%), Cabernet Franc (3 %), Petit Verdot (1 %). The average age of the vines is 50 years.
The estate benefits from exceptionally favourable natural conditions, in the quality of the soil, the position of its vines and their exposure to the sun. Combining respect for tradition with the latest technology, it receives meticulous attention from grape to bottle. The wine is matured in new French oak barrels.
Le Petit Mouton de Mouton Rothschild is the second wine of Château Mouton Rothschild.
The estate also comprises 6 hectares (15 acres) of sandy, gravelly soil planted with Sauvignon Blanc (51%), Semillon (40%) and Sauvignon Gris (9%), used to make its white wine, Aile d’Argent.
Brought to the pinnacle by two exceptional people, Baron Philippe de Rothschild (1902-1988) then his daughter Baroness Philippine (1933-2014), its destiny has now been taken in hand by her three children: Camille and Philippe Sereys de Rothschild, and Julien de Beaumarchais de Rothschild. True to their grandfather’s and mother’s work, all three are committed, with the same enthusiasm and determination, to perpetuating Baron Philippe’s dictum: “Live for the vine”. Almost a command, it means being there for the vineyard in good times and in hardship, serving it with skill and honouring it with art.
Château Mouton Rothschild is a place of art and beauty, famous for the spectacular vista of its great barrel hall, its remarkable vat room and its Museum of Wine in Art. Every year since 1945, the Château Mouton Rothschild label has been illustrated with an original artwork by a great contemporary artist. Dalí, César, Miró, Chagall, Warhol, Soulages, Bacon, Balthus, Tàpies, Koons and Doig are only some of the artists featured in a fascinating collection to which a new work is added each year and which makes up the Paintings for the Labels exhibition.