Chateau Charmail (Futures Pre-Sale) 2009
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Wine
Spectator -
Robert
Parker
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Wine Spectator
Tar, blueberry and currant aromas follow through to a full body, with soft, chewy tannins and a long finish. Big and juicy.
Barrel Sample: 91-94 Points -
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
This is another over-achieving estate that tends to produce wines with lots of intensity and structure. This wine certainly has the formidable intensity one expects from Charmail, but the tannins are silky smooth and the result is the sexiest Charmail to date. An opulent, even voluptuously textured wine, full-bodied and dense purple in color, it is a seductive blend of 47% Merlot, 35% Cabernet Sauvignon and the rest Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. It was bottled unfined and unfiltered and came in with natural alcohols of 14%. The low acidity, plush fruit and silky tannins all suggest drinking this over the next decade. It is another sleeper of the vintage, of which there is nearly an endless supply in this great year.
Charmail takes its name from its history that dates back to the 16th century, namely the Trevey family of Charmail who settled at that time in the Médoc. Built in the middle of the 19th century, Chateau Charmail commands a charming estate overlooking the Gironde on the northern side of Saint-Estephe. Surrounding the chateau, the vineyard is all of a piece, situated on gravel crests and at present covers some twenty-eight hectares. It is planted to Cabernet franc and Cabernet-Sauvignon, Merlot and Petit Verdot.
The owner Bernard d'Halluin strives to create wines of balance, and since 2017 has HVE3 certification for sustainability. Winemaking is performed by the former owner, Olivier Sèze, a trained agronomist, well-versed in the latest enological methods. Sèze has be-come a veritable pioneer ("maverick" might be the more accurate term) in the Médoc. Since 1991, his successful development of the technique called, "pre-fermentation, cold maceration" has roused interest through-out the Médoc, in Saint-Emilion, and even at the Institute of Enology in Bordeaux. The technique is similar to that widely employed by the Burgundian enologist, Guy Accad, although much less sulfur dioxide is used at Charmail. It results in deeply colored, "fatter" wines with softer tannins than might otherwise be the case using traditional fermentation techniques.