Winemaker Notes
Deep and intense red color with purple and cherry edges. Intense fruit expression with black fruit such as maqui berry and cassis well mixed with red fruit such as cherry and plums. Slightly spiced with anise and cedar notes. Delicate fresh violets fragrance. Big structure and good volume, balance with a remarkable acidity
Enjoy with an Angus loin in myrtle berry sauce, beef tenderloin and spinach cooked in cream cheese and almonds; venison with grilled seasonal vegetables.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Blackberry, fresh herb, wet earth and tar aromas follow through to a full body, with powerful tannins and density yet an agile and polished, textured finish. Much better than 2014. The second wine of Clos Apalta. Try it in 2021.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The second wine in a true Bordeaux sense, the 2015 Le Petit Clos is a wine of structure and good balance in the manner of their 2001 and 2006, concentrated and powerful vintages. It's a blend of 49% Cabernet Sauvignon, 47% Carmenère and 4% Petit Verdot from younger slope vineyards and Cabernet Sauvignon from Clos Apalta. The wine is produced in the same way as the grand vin, but it has less oak and has quite a lot of character from the Carmenère. I find this fresher and less oaky than the wines I have in mind from the past, with more elegance within their style.
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Wine Enthusiast
Ripe berry and cassis aromas come with richer oak-based notes of mint, coconut and baking spice. A lively, fresh palate holds spicy black fruit flavors along with toast and mild herbal notes. Flavors of black coffee, black pepper and dark chocolate grace the finish on this blend of undefined red grapes. Drink through 2025.
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Wine Spectator
Very lithe and minerally, with focused dried red fruit flavors that are supported by fresh acidity and medium-grained tannins. The vibrant finish offers hints of white pepper and dried tarragon. Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenère and Petit Verdot. Drink now through 2022.
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.