2000 Château Léoville Barton, St Julien, Bordeaux

Dark crimson. Very solid and savoury on the nose. Essence of St James's Street?! Lots of mass here and something really very promising even if it is far from its full realisation. Bravo!Drink 2015 - 2035jancis_robinson_mw, JancisRobinson.com (Mar 2010)

The 2000 Léoville-Barton has a juicy, ripe bouquet of macerated black cherries, incense, potpourri and veins of blue fruit. The palate is medium-bodied with fine-grained tannins, good density, nice structure and a sappy conclusion. This has opened up in recent years and displays a touch of ash toward the finish. Drinking perfectly now, it’s a decent Léoville-Barton that never quite achieves the heights of recent stellar vintages.Drink 2021 - 2032Neil Martin, Vinous.com.com (Sep 2021)

This wine has always been soft and delicious, with an almost decadent character of strawberry tart, earth, meat and spices. It’s full and very soft, with refined tannins and a very long finish.james_suckling, jamessuckling_com (Apr 2014)

I found this to be one of the more backward wines of the 2000 vintage and gave it a window of maturity of 2015-2040 when I reviewed it in 2003. In my two recent tastings of it, I changed that window to 2018-2050, which probably says more than the following tasting note could say. This is a behemoth dense, highly extracted, very tannic, broodingly backward, with a dense purple color and very little evolution since it was bottled 8 years ago. Wonderfully sweet cedar and fruitcake notes are intermixed with hints of creme de cassis, licorice, and earthy forest floor. It is full-bodied and tannic, with everything in place, but like so many wines that come from Leoville Barton, it makes a mockery of many modern-day consumers wanting a wine for immediate gratification. Those who bought it should continue to exercise patience and be proud to own a wonderful classic with five decades of longevity ahead of it.Robert M. Parker, Jr. - 29/06/2010

Absolutely spectacular from bottle, but frightfully closed and backward, with massive power and structure, the saturated purple-colored 2000 Leoville Barton is one of the greatest wines ever made at this estate. The wine has smoky, earthy notes intermixed with graphite, camphor, damp earth, jammy cassis, cedar, and a hint of mushroom. Enormous, even monstrous in the mouth, with tremendous extraction, broodingly backward, dense flavors, and copious tannins, this should prove to be one of the longest-lived wines of the vintage and one of the most compelling Leoville Bartons ever made. robert_parker - Wine Advocate - Apr 03