Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is a great red with polished tannins that have tension and intensity, making you want to drink it. Shows wonderful reserve and focus. Precision winemaking. A blend of carmenere, merlot and cabernet sauvignon. Always one of the top wines of Chile. Drink or hold.
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Wine Enthusiast
Cool aromas of cola, coffee, blackberry, stewed plum, herbs and minerals make for a highly attractive and complex bouquet. In the mouth, wall-to-wall power and tannins suggest that this needs a few more years to mellow out. Flavors of stewed plum, blackberry, Carolina barbecue sauce and a hint of citrus peel are complex and set up a deep finish with dark flavors and intensity to spare. Drink from 2016 through 2025. The blend is 57% Carmenère, 34% Cabernet Sauvignon and 9% Merlot.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2011 Clos Apalta is a blend from a cold vintage aged in 100% new barrels for about two years, depending on how they find the wine, and the wine that makes it into the bottle is a barrel selection. 2011 was a cool vintage, perhaps something between 2010 and 2013, warmer than the former, more moderate than the latter; it’s the freshest of all the vintages that I tried, with good acidity, finer tannins, density, freshness and finesse as well as very good balance and a silky texture. As for future vintages, the 2012 will be bottled earlier, as it was a warm vintage and needs less maturing in oak. The 2013, which is still very young and was pre-blended the day before my tasting with Michel Rolland, will be bottled a year from now and will be re-evaluated before being bottled, when the blend might be adjusted at the last minute. I also tasted an impressive new wine from very old vines that were traditionally blended into the Clos with a long aging in the T5 barrels from Taransaud.
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Tasting Panel
Dark and dense with velvety texture and ripe, smooth plum and black raspberry fruit; notes of chocolate, licorice and spice; deep and long. Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Carmenere.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
A pretty fine effort, the 2011 Lapostolle Clos Apalta offers tremendous elegance in a large volume wine. This wine's fullness combined with its excellent structure suggest lamb as a matching meat entrée. Drinking youthfully now. (Tasted: August 18, 2016, San Francisco, CA)
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Wine Spectator
This is redolent of milk chocolate and raspberry preserves, with plenty of cream and spice in the mix. Offers a mocha-filled midpalate, with savory notes on the spicy finish. A rich and well-crafted red. Drink now through 2018. 3,550 cases made.
Clos Apalta is a state-of-the-art winery built to amplify Apalta's unique terroir through a lens of legendary French winemaking expertise. Under the watchful eye of Charles-Henri de Bournet and winemaker Andrea Leon, Clos Apalta remains among South America's most iconic producers.
The revolutionary six-story winery is built into the granite hillside of 'The Clos' in the proportions of the Golden Ratio, representing perfect natural equilibrium. In this way, the winery itself is an element of their minimal-intervention winemaking philosophy: hand harvesting, gentle extraction, wild yeast fermentation, minimal filtration, and 100% gravity-fed from the sorting table to the cellar.
“My mother, Alexandra Marnier Lapostolle, always dreamt of crafting the perfect wine. She spent years in search of an exceptional terroir to create a unique wine which would come to take its place as one of the best in the world. Having crossed several continents, she found the picture-perfect location of the Apalta Valley. She let the rolling mountains and sunlit air of the Apalta Valley speak to her, guessed the extraordinary potential, and tamed it. Clos Apalta was thus born, an enchanting wine with a shimmering texture and complexity that stimulates the senses and excites the imagination.” - Charles-Henri de Bournet
One of the world’s most classic and popular styles of red wine, Bordeaux-inspired blends have spread from their homeland in France to nearly every corner of the New World. Typically based on either Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot and supported by Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot, the best of these are densely hued, fragrant, full of fruit and boast a structure that begs for cellar time. Somm Secret—Blends from Bordeaux are generally earthier compared to those from the New World, which tend to be fruit-dominant.
Well-regarded for intense and exceptionally high quality red wines, the Colchagua Valley is situated in the southern part of Chile’s Rapel Valley, with many of the best vineyards lying in the foothills of the Coastal Range.
Heavy French investment and cutting-edge technology in both the vineyard and the winery has been a boon to the local viticultural industry, which already laid claim to ancient vines and a textbook Mediterranean climate.
The warm, dry growing season in the Colchagua Valley favors robust reds made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenère, Malbec and Syrah—in fact, some of Chile’s very best are made here. A small amount of good white wine is produced from Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.