Le Petit Clos 2015
The second wine in a true Bordeaux sense, the 2015 Le Petit Clos is a wine of structure and good balance...concentrated and powerful.Luis Gutierrez, Wine Advocate
Tasting Notes
Color
Intense and deep ruby red with purple and cherry edges.
Nose
Complex and expressive. Very intense with black fruit such as maqui berry, cassis and black currant aromas. Red fruit aromas such as cherries and strawberry with fresh herb notes and a touch of vanilla. Spices and cedar notes.
Palate
Silky and elegant attack, followed with round and persistent tannins. Remarkably dense and concentrated. Good volume, balance with a remarkable acidity. Long finish.
Vintage Report
APPELATION
Apalta Valley, Colchagua, Chile.
BLEND
49% Cabernet Sauvignon, 47% Carmenère and 4% Petit Verdot.
HARVEST
Organic certified vineyard by CERES (Germany). Biodynamic certified vineyard by DEMETER (Germany). Carmenère and Cabernet Sauvignon Pre-phylloxera old vines planted in 1920 not grafted.
GROWING CONDITIONS
Winter 2014 was considered as rainy in Apalta, with higher temperatures compared to the previous season, moving from a minimum of 4.5°C to 14.7°C maximum. This translates into 0.5°C more than the 2014 period. Spring 2014 had moderate temperatures allowing good bud break and blooming, been both very homogeneous. Summer was more temperate than usual, with some heat waves that lasted for 5 consecutive days in January. This season Colchagua registered the higher growing degree days’ sum of the last three periods, due mainly to the high temperatures registered towards the end of summer, made of March the warmest of the last decades. However, grapes showed excellent quality when picked with a good aromatic expression and good tannic structure.
VINIFICATION
Our Petit Clos was hand harvested in small cases of 12 kilos. The grapes are then hand de-stemmed in our Clos Apalta Winery so we maintain complete control of the quality. We fill our fermentation French oak vats by gravity. We use native yeast to ferment the grape juice into wine, with temperature control max. 30°C. Macerations lasted for a maximum of 6 weeks and during that period we did gentle manual punch downs to extract enough compounds from skins to get the desired structure and concentration. We rack the young new wine straight into 100% new French oak barrels by gravity. Natural malolactic occurred in the barrels, where the wine stayed for 6 months. After that, we did the selection of the lots for the wine and the first racking. The wine was then aged for another 17 months in 22% New French Oak barrels, 49% one-year-old used French oak barrels and 29% in Oak vats of 75hL. We estate bottled the wine by gravity without any treatment or filtration.
Technical sheet
Find out more with our detailed technical sheet.
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