Winemaker Notes
The grapes for Les Picasses are destemmed, and fermentation happens spontaneously with indigenous yeasts. Malolactic fermentation takes place in casks. The wine is aged in 3-to-10-year-old barriques for 18 months on its fine lees, racked, fined with egg white and bottled. It is a wine of great intensity of flavor – minerally-tinged black cherry and kirsch – and can be aged for many years.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2018 Chinon Les Picasses is from the famous plateau between the Loire and the Vienne Rivers. Rooting in deep silty clay soils on chalky tuff limestone mother rock and covered by limestone pebbles for 15-60 years and aged for 12 months in three- to seven-year-old barrels, the 2018 opens with an intense but elegant and refined bouquet of dark fruits and spicy notes. Silky, round and intense on the palate, this is a full-bodied, deep and complex, very long and sustainable Picasses with stimulating vitality and salinity. The tannins are ripe and fine and intermingle well with the fine acidity of this juicy and stimulating Chinon—for now and the next 20-30 years (if cellared perfectly).
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Wine Spectator
This red offers solid complexity, with dark currant, cigar box and sanguine flavors that are supported with bay leaf, savory spice and floral accents. Taut, with firm tannins.
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