Winemaker Notes
Enjoy with an Angus loin in myrtle berry sauce, beef tenderloin and spinach cooked with cream cheese and almonds; venison with grilled seasonal vegetables.
Blend: 40% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Carmenère, 28% Merlot, 2% Petit Verdot
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A tight and linear red with blackcurrant and blueberry character. Hints of iron and oyster shell. Medium to full body. Focused. Refined. The second wine of Clos Apalta.
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Wine & Spirits
Petit Clos is the new younger brother of the classic carmenere-based Clos Apalta, a second selection of the estates old vineyards in El Condor de Apalta, where some of the vines are almost 100 years old. This blend is 30 percent carmenere, while Clos is more than 70 percent. The balance of Petit is cabernet sauvignon (40 percent), merlot, as well as some petit verdot from younger vines. Dark cherry and dark, bitter chocolate lend a savory note to balance the lovely, sweet notes of blackberry in this wine, which is tighter, more focused and narrower than its big brother. It is fresher, too, but with a similar depth of flavor coming from these venerable old vines."
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Wine Enthusiast
A black color and baked ripe-fruit aromas are the greeting on this second wine to Clos Apalta. While this blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenère, Merlot and Petit Verdot feels soft along the edges, it's propped up by tartaric acidity. Blackened flavors of saturated blackberry and cassis maintain lush ripeness across the finish. Drink through 2020.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
A different interpretation of the Apalta terroir through blending, the 2014 Le Petit Clos is mostly Cabernet Sauvignon with 30% Carmenere, 28% Merlot and 2% Petit Verdot. It aged in new French barriques for eight months followed by a further 18 months with equal parts in new barriques, used barriques and 7,500-liter oak vats. There is a little less oak here and more Cabernet in the first vintage of this second wine in the Bordeaux style. It's quite classical and faithful with the house style of ripe, concentrated and generously oaked wines. The palate shows plenty of tannins and oak-related flavors, spices, tobacco and roasted coffee. It ends with marked oak 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.