Winemaker Notes
The wine, which used to be the assembly of various plots, becomes a terroir wine that provides a stunning and undeniably dense mouth-feel. The quality of this sandy, calcareous soil, its exposition to hours of sunlight on the hill and the wine making procedures make Les Pensées de Pallus the “premier cru” of the Domaine.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Offers enticing mulled spice and black tea nuances at first while a core of gently steeped cherry and blackberry fruit unwinds, showing savory and chalky mineral details through the finish. Latent length.
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James Suckling
Aromas of cracked pepper, bark, blackberries, cloves and blackcurrant leaves. It’s medium-bodied with vibrant acidity and fine tannins. Fresh and peppery. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
From the very best plots of the sandy limestone slopes in Cravant-les-Côteaux, the 2017 Chinon Les Pensées de Pallus offers a pure, fresh, fragrant and intense bouquet of ripe and concentrated as well as spicy red and dark berries (most of all blackberries and cassis but also cherries) and earthy, mineral and floral aromas. Silky textured, fresh and vital on the palate, this is a full-bodied, juicy but also straight and tight Cabernet Franc with an intense and elegant, fruity texture that represents both layers of the terroir: sand and tuff limestone. This is an excellent, nervy and stimulating Chinon from Bertrand Sourdais.
Cabernet Franc, a proud parent of Cabernet Sauvignon, is the subtler and more delicate of the Cabernets. Today Cabernet Franc produces outstanding single varietal wines across the wine-producing world. Somm Secret—One of California's best-kept secrets is the Happy Canyon appellation of Santa Barbara. Here Cabernet Franc shines as a single varietal wine or in blends, expressing sumptuous fruit, savory aromas and polished tannins.
An important red wine appellation in the Touraine district of the Loire, Chinon produces fanciful, light-bodied reds from the Cabernet Franc grape. Chinon also makes charming rosés from the same grape as well as white wines from Chenin blanc. But the reds give the area its fame. Often scented with fresh herbs, black tea and violets, Chinon reds show a lovely combination of fruit and acidity. However, styles have become more concentrated and ripe in recent years from improvements in vineyard management. Modern methods include planting grass between vineyard rows, using higher trellises and deleafing to increase sunlight to berries and therefore improve ripening. Even still, red Chinon is intended to be a light to medium bodied, refreshing wine to be enjoyed in its youth.
Fuller-bodied Chinons come from vineyard sites on the clay and tuffeau limestone slopes, usually from the southern exposed slopes of Cravant-les-Coteaux, and the plateau above Beaumont. Lighter styled wines come from the sand and gravel vineyards near the Loire or Vienne Rivers with the most refined examples coming from the area around Panzoult