The rating for 1986 Chateau Talbot St Julien is 96 points from Robert Parker and the tasting note - A fabulous wine, and one of the two greatest Talbots of the last 50 years, this wine still has a very murky garnet/plum/purple color and a spectacular nose of sweet creme de cassis intermixed with freshly ground pepper, melted road tar, herbes de Provence, and beef blood. It is followed by an enormously concentrated wine of full body, layers of concentration and sweet tannin. The wine seems to be just hitting its plateau of maturity, where it should last for at least 10-15 more years. A prodigious Talbot. The rating for 1986 Chateau Lynch Bages Pauillac is 94 points from Robert Parker and the tasting note - The 1986 Lynch Bages has a knockout bouquet that wraps its arms around you with all its loveliness - pure black cherries, mint and cedar, even a touch of glycerine still there. Vibrant and youthful. The palate is beautifully balanced, crisp and taut, linear but very precise with a fine bead of acidity. You just fall for the harmony of this Lynch Bages, the intensity of fruit that seems undiminished on the finish. Is it up there with the 1989 and 1990? Maybe not, but it is not far behind. Frankly this Lynch Bages is a 1986 Claret that you cannot own too much of and as I commented to Jean-Michel Cazes tasting alongside me, at 30 years of age it still has more to give. The rating for 1986 Chateau Leoville Las Cases St Julien is 98 points from Robert Parker and the tasting note - The 1986 Leoville-Las Cases is still so youthful in appearance after 30 years, with only a thin bricking on the rim giving away its age. The bouquet is magnificent - extraordinarily pure and delineated, bewitching black fruit laced with cedar and graphite, the latter lending an almost Pauillac-like personality. The palate is exactly as I have found the previous dozen or so bottles I have tasted - structured, delineated, intense, aristocratic and imperious. It is less formidable than say, ten years ago, so it has probably just stepped onto its drinking plateau. The acidity is perfectly judged lending freshness and tension, crucial to counterbalance those layers of spicy black fruit that fans out with cedar and graphite (again) towards the finish. You come away with the feeling of having consumed a wine with immense energy, yet with so much more to give over the next three decades, and knowing this property, perhaps even the three decades after that! I would agree with the late Michel Delon - the 1986 Léoville Las-Cases is the summit of the 1980s.