Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine is ripe, smooth, balanced, perfumed and already delicious. Wood aging has added to the richness of the wine, which is also packed with red fruits. Drink this wine from 2020.
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Wine Spectator
Darker in color, but with an elegant profile, featuring a silky texture and well-integrated chalky tannins. Notes of currant, Turkish coffee and rose hip lend this charm, while savory herbal elements and a minerally structure add to the complexity. Complete and intense, but give this a few years to show its best. Best from 2021 through 2030.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2017 Chinon Les Grézeaux is from the valley and cultivated on gravelly soils with sand and clay. Fermented in cement and aged for the first time in a large oak cask and also in concrete, this dark-colored Cabernet Franc offers a beautifully intense and floral bouquet of dark ripe fruits. It is smooth, sweet and generous on the palate, super ripe, round and well concentrated, with lots of dark fruit flavors (blue berries) and remarkably fresh elegance and finesse. Tasted in June 2021.
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