Winemaker Notes
The 2005 vintage of this wine was ranked #1 on the Wine Spectator's Top 10 Wines of 2008
Deep purple-red in color with intense and complex aromas. The nose has layers, such as spices, black and red fruit, herbs and mineral touches of lead pencil. This wine has elegant balance with velvety and well defined tannins, that evolve towards a concentrated mid palate that is filled with juicy tannins, followed by a very long persistence.
This is an ideal companion for game, lamb, and entrecote fillet. Also good with rich cocoa chocolate deserts.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is very dense and full with loads of blackberries, wet earth and hints of mint. Lead pencil too. Full body and very chewy plus shows hints of new wood and spice. A fruit-forward style.
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Wine Enthusiast
Deep as a mine, with herbal, tobacco and leather accents sprucing up serious berry fruit flavors. Drink now through 2016.l
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Wine Spectator
This is a rich and enticing red, with alluring aromas of warm cocoa and roasted vanilla bean giving way to lush plum sauce, cassis and raspberry ganache flavors. The long, smoldering finish is velvety and dripping with pure fruit, all of it backed by a suave tobacco note. Carmenère, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Petit Verdot. Best from 2011 through 2017. 4,538 cases made.
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Wine & Spirits
Michel Rolland fashions this blend from a south-facing amphitheater, where the old vines are predominantly carmenère. The vineyard produces a rich red, pushed to the edge of monumental excess in the warm 2007 vintage. The wine brings sweet things to mind—figs, Morello cherry marmalade, mocha and chocolate—while the texture is extravagant and dense. It’s impressive, not only in stature, but also in the grandeur of its flavors.
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.