Chateau d'Yquem 2023 Sauternes Premier Cru Superieur, Bordeaux, France

What else can we add about the legend of Yquem?  It was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite wine.  It was rated above all other chateaux, including Lafite, in the famous 1855 Classification.  It has been France’s most prized sweet wine for over two centuries.  In a fickle society where a whole lot of wine consumers refuse to put a sweet wine to their lips, this kind of history simply doesn’t register.  Obviously, this wine is not for them. 

Also, then is then and now is now.  What do the experts who relish these wines have to say about the modern d’Yquem, now majority owned by the publicly traded LVMH corporation as part of their luxury portfolio? 

“100 Points.  With 153 grams per liter of residual sugar—placing it among the 10 most concentrated vintages in the château’s history—the 2023 d'Yquem ranks among the finest wines bottled here under Lorenzo Pasquini’s direction. It unfurls from the glass with a complex, vibrant and remarkably pure bouquet of pineapple, guava, mango, confit citrus, beeswax and spices. Full-bodied, dense and concentrated, it combines formidable depth with perfectly judged control, built around a fleshy core of fruit, framed by lively acidity and a crystalline texture and culminating in an endless, refined and ethereal finish. Yquem’s natural power is here masterfully harnessed by the vintage’s freshness and tension, revealing an aesthetic of precision and vibrancy encountered only in the estate’s greatest years—made all the more remarkable by the fact that the château now achieves even higher levels of concentration than a decade ago, without any perceptible increase in sweetness on the palate.”--Yohan Castaing, RobertParker.com