Wine Region: Bordeaux - France

Grape: 65% Cabernet Sauvignon, 29% Merlot, 5% Cabernet Franc and 1% Petit Verdot

Expert Rating: 

100 points James Suckling

 Blueberries, currants and Indian spices on the nose follow through to a full body, with ultra-fine tannins and a lovely finish. It's intense and refined. A beauty. It goes on for minutes. Speechless. Better and cleaner than the great 1990. Try in 2022.  (3/2012)

100 points Robert Parker's Wine Advocate

 A brilliant wine that stands out as one of the high points of the vintage, the 2009 Montrose unwinds in the glass with a rich and incipiently complex bouquet of dark berries, cigar wrapper and loamy soil, framed by a deftly judged touch of new oak. Full-bodied, broad and enveloping, it's a velvety, layered and impressively dynamic wine that's deep and concentrated, exhibiting terrific balance and a long, resonant finish. While it is still five or six years away from showing all its cards, I have drunk this benchmark for contemporary Montrose with immense pleasure three times this year. In style, it's hard to find an obvious comparison (and I have drunk Montrose back to 1895), but I would be inclined to invoke a fresher, more complete and more powerful version of the estate's very successful 2003. (WK)  (8/2022)

98 points Decanter

 The 2009 Montrose shows elegant, rich, well-placed fruit, full of generosity. It's silky and velvety in texture, with good freshness despite the exoticism of the fruit structure, with black pepper and garrigue edging. The tannins are still pretty biting and the acidity is higher than many in 2009. Settling in for the long haul, this is without doubt a Montrose that has form and future. (JA)  (2/2019)

98 points Vinous

 The 2009 Montrose has a taut, brilliantly defined bouquet with intense black fruit laced with crushed stone, forest floor, crushed rose petals and a touch of slate. Magnificent. The palate is medium-bodied with firm tannin, good depth and grip, plenty of graphite locked in here with a bravura finish that indicates that this Saint-Estèphe is in for the long-haul. It may well deserve a higher score as it evolves in bottle. Everything you wish for in a Montrose. (NM) 98+ 

About the winery: 

Montrose is one of the greatest estates in Bordeaux. Its spectacular terroir in the prime sector of St Estephe has been brought to its pinnacle by owner Martin Bouygues and his team, leading to a run of sublime performances over a decade long; in a number of these vintages, it stands scrutiny as a potential ‘wine of the vintage’. Saint-Estephe is the Médoc’s most northerly commune, lying just beyond the confines of Pauillac, and stretches up the Gironde estuary, a mere 50 kilometre swim away from the Atlantic Ocean. The soil boasts a larger proportion of clay than the rest of the Médoc which, in the past, has lent the wines a traditional austerity requiring lengthier aging than their cousins further south. With climate change, however, where long periods of intense sunshine and near drought conditions have become the norm, vines planted in the commune’s moisture-retaining clay have thrived and few exemplify this better than the exceptional Chateau Montrose.