Winemaker Notes
Dark and deep red color with purple edges. The nose is intense and spicy, overlapping with layers of red and black fruit, graphite, and cedar notes. Balanced and concentrated with refined tannins that open up the palate, with a bright structure that brings more fruit and spices towards a very long finish.
Clos Apalta can be cellared for many years or enjoyed with duck, lamb and potatoes, or dark chocolate.
Blend: 66% Carmenère, 21% Cabernet Sauvignon, 13% Merlot
Professional Ratings
-
James Suckling
Deep but fleshier and rounder this year, showing more openness and supple fruit. A touch of balsamic as well, with some dark olives and hints of violets and paprika to the rich but honest core. Full-bodied with a creamy center palate. Long and resolved in the finish. A blend of 66% carmenere, 21% cabernet sauvignon and 13% merlot. Aged 19 months in barrels, including 70% new oak.
-
Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2023 Clos Apalta is an impressive testament to the consistency this team routinely achieves. As is typical, it is the most powerful wine in the range, opening with an expressive and confident bouquet of ripe red and blue fruits with signature floral overtones, nuanced herbal flourishes and an elegantly woody backdrop that is already remarkably well integrated. The mouthfeel echoes the generous nature of the harvest while maintaining an impressively upright and focused structural posture that carries through to an expansive, ultra-refined finish. I suspect this will benefit from a bit of extra time in bottle to congeal, and it should drink well into the start of its second decade. The blend is 66% Carmenère, 21% Cabernet Sauvignon and 13% Merlot.
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.