Winemaker Notes
The 2005 vintage of this wine was ranked #1 on the Wine Spectator's Top 10 Wines of 2008
Deep purple inky red color. On the nose, focused, with a very special purity of fresh black and red fruit and elegant herbs aromas. Elegant and balance on the palate with silky and juicy tannins. More fruit flavors and a very long finish.
Open and leave to breathe for a couple of hours or carefully decant for minimum 1 hour and enjoy at room temperature; 60 to 65 F. Ideal companion for game, lamb, and entrecote fillet. Also good with rich cocoa chocolate deserts.
Blend: 73% Carmenere, 17% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Merlot
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is linear and tight with freshness and intensity. Medium-to-full body, bright acidity and focus. Love the finish. So right now. A blend of 73% carmenere, 17% cabernet sauvignon and 10% merlot.
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Wine Enthusiast
Clos Apalta, depending on your point of view, is arguably Chile's best wine. And this vintage is outstanding! Earth, minty spice, ripe berry, minerality and smoky aromas cover the bases. It's superbly structured, with a fine texture and depth. Tastes lush and complex, with blackberry, creme de cassis, fine herbs and tobacco. Finishes classy.
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Wine Spectator
Fine-tuned and expressive, yet focused, this red has terrific display of dark, racy blackberry, boysenberry and braised fig flavors finely woven with spice, mesquite and cured olive hints. Silky tannins frame the long finish, with an aftertaste of fruit and mocha. Carmenère, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Drink now through 2017. Tasted twice, with consistent notes. 4,771 cases made.
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Wine & Spirits
A blend based on old-vine carmenere, this latest vintage of Clos Apalta is faithful to its style: a tremendously ripe wine full of fig flavors, fresh roasted coffee and chestnut scents. The structure is as big as it is powerful, and though the texture is youthfully rough, there's so much concentration of flavor that the astringency moves to the background. This is built to cellar, or to decant for braised lamb.
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.