Winemaker Notes
Bright red garnet with violet edges. Very intense nose with black fruit, herbs and black currant aromas. Red fruit aromas such as cherries and strawberry with spices and cedar notes. Round and elegant palate, followed with round and persistent tannins. with a dense and concentrated finish.
Blend: 40% Carménère, 38% Cabernet Sauvignon, 19% Merlot, 3% Petit Verdot
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A beautiful delivery of Petit Clos with spiced black cherries, cassis, olives and some red capsicums to the nose. Chalky tannins are densely packed on the medium- to full-bodied palate. Tight, structured and fine-grained. Very long.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The second wine of the estate, the 2020 Le Petit Clos checks in as 40% Carmenère, 38% Cabernet Sauvignon, 19% Merlot, and the rest Petit Verdot that was brought up in 53% new French oak. Ripe red and black fruits, graphite, scorched earth, and cedary spice notes define the aromatics, and it's medium to full-bodied on the palate, has firm, polished tannins, terrific depth and richness, and a great finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The second wine from Clos Apalta, the 2020 Le Petit Clos, was produced with the grapes from younger vines and in a different proportion than in the grand vins; it's a blend of 40% Carmenere, 38% Cabernet Sauvignon, 19% Merlot and 3% Petit Verdot from their granite soils in the warm Apalta valley from a warm and ripe year. The wine has the lush and ripe signature, with 15% alcohol, decadent and showy, with a nose of violets and camphor, ripe berries, herbs and spices and integrated oak. It fermented with indigenous yeasts, with five to six weeks of maceration, manual punch-downs and malolactic in French oak barrels. The élevage was 26 months in 53% new oak and 47% second use oak. It has the velvety tannins from a warm vintage—fine-grained and abundant—with a long finish with a bitter twist.
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Wine Spectator
A restrained red that begs for a few years to develop. For now, this offers an entry of dried lavender and cigar box, which join the palate of spiced blackberry and plum. Generous, lively acidity helps to unlock the flavors, adding coca powder accents. Still, firm tannins arrive quickly, and the finish.
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Wine Enthusiast
A lightly perfumed nose reveals aromas of vanilla bean and meaty plum. There is a rich combination of berries and wood spices on the smooth palate of this blend made with 4-% Carmenere. 38% Cabernet Sauvignon, 19% Merlot and a splash of Petit Verdot. Despite the warm year, it shows freshness and balance.
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.