Winemaker Notes
Here's the image it conjures up: a long hike on the forest, where you have found chanterelle mushrooms that you saute to accompany a roasted guinea hen. The combination of mushroom, bird, and Chinon is restorative.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Chinon Le Clos Guillot is another impressive Cabernet Franc from Bernard Baudry. The bouquet reveals a perfectly ripe, refined and elegant yet also intense dark fruit aroma reminiscent of blackberries and cherries intermixed with leather and some distinctive flinty aromas. Quite open from this bottle but highly attractive. Silky, round and with remarkable finesse and tension, this is a full-bodied, concentrated and quite tannic Chinon with a still astringent finish but with enough sweetness and intensity for good aging potential. The aftertaste is long and compact and once more represents the concentrated character of the berries when harvested. An impressive wine whose future is even more great than its current status. Tasted in June 2021. Rating : 93+
Cabernet Franc, a proud parent of Cabernet Sauvignon, is the subtler and more delicate of the Cabernets. Today Cabernet Franc produces outstanding single varietal wines across the wine-producing world. Somm Secret—One of California's best-kept secrets is the Happy Canyon appellation of Santa Barbara. Here Cabernet Franc shines as a single varietal wine or in blends, expressing sumptuous fruit, savory aromas and polished tannins.
An important red wine appellation in the Touraine district of the Loire, Chinon produces fanciful, light-bodied reds from the Cabernet Franc grape. Chinon also makes charming rosés from the same grape as well as white wines from Chenin blanc. But the reds give the area its fame. Often scented with fresh herbs, black tea and violets, Chinon reds show a lovely combination of fruit and acidity. However, styles have become more concentrated and ripe in recent years from improvements in vineyard management. Modern methods include planting grass between vineyard rows, using higher trellises and deleafing to increase sunlight to berries and therefore improve ripening. Even still, red Chinon is intended to be a light to medium bodied, refreshing wine to be enjoyed in its youth.
Fuller-bodied Chinons come from vineyard sites on the clay and tuffeau limestone slopes, usually from the southern exposed slopes of Cravant-les-Coteaux, and the plateau above Beaumont. Lighter styled wines come from the sand and gravel vineyards near the Loire or Vienne Rivers with the most refined examples coming from the area around Panzoult