Winemaker Notes
Lapostolle Cuvée Alexandre Carmenére boasts a complex nose with red and black fruit, spice, herbal, and vanilla aromas. Bright and vivid, it is harvested late in the season, producing a medium structure with juicy, round tannins.
Pair Cuvée Alexandre Carmenére with dishes such as rabbit or four-cheese pasta with grated truffles. This wine can be cellared for several years.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
A fresh, spicy carmenere loaded with fruit. Dark cherries, tobacco, pepper, spices and touches of paprika, dark olives, graphite and dark chocolate. Juicy and fruit-expressive on the palate with a medium to full body and fresh, fine-grained tannins. Flavorful and long.
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Vinous
The 2022 Carménère Cuvée Alexandre, sourced from Apalta in the Colchagua Valley, presents a ripe and precise expression. Purple in hue, it exudes soft ash and marmalade aromas with hints of blackberry and boldo. Dry, rich and bold, the voluminous palate is fairly fleshy and reactive due to its muscular, rounded tannins. This is an intense and flavorful Apalta Carménère.
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine comes from vines in Apalta within the Colchagua Valley, one of Carménère’s favorite spots in Chile. It opens with an inviting nose of oak spices and blueberry jam. Concentrated black-fruit flavors are bright on the palate. The finish is long, with hints of vanilla.
Lapostolle was founded in 1994 by Alexandra Marnier Lapostolle and her husband Cyril de Bournet upon their discovery of a unique clos in the Apalta Valley sheltering 100-year-old pre-phylloxera vines. They quickly realized its potential for producing world-class wines and embarked on their family’s next chapter in the New World. Alexandra brought generations of French winemaking tradition and expertise to the rugged landscape of the Colchagua Valley.
Today, Charles de Bournet, the seventh generation, leads the winery in its newest chapter of innovation, punctuated by the official recognition of the Apalta DO in 2018. Together with Andrea León, Technical Director & Winemaker, Lapostolle continue to craft wines that honor the winery’s credo: French in essence, Chilean by birth.
Dark, full-bodied and herbaceous with a spicy kick, Carménère found great success with its move to Chile in the mid-19th century. However, the variety went a bit undercover until 1994 when many plantings previously thought to be Merlot, were profiled as Carménère. Somm Secret— Carménère is both a progeny and a great-grandchild of the similarly flavored Cabernet Franc.
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.