Nose
On retrouve immédiatement la signature singulière de Climens dans ce grand millésime, dont le bouquet est déjà complexe et profond, mêlant des parfums de fleurs nobles et d’herbes des champs.
Palate
On retrouve cette sensation de prestance sauvage en bouche, avec une présence saline qui lui donne un relief et une personnalité très forts malgré la douceur que lui confère sa jeunesse. Puissance, raffinement, longueur, tout y est déjà !
Growing Conditions
Within the Sauternes appellation, the village of Barsac is the only one to benefit from its own appellation: its terroir, with a predominance of limestone gives different wines, often less opulent than those from Sauternes, but generally endowed with greater freshness in terms of balance and aromatic expression. The Barsac vineyard stands out across the heart of the rolling landscapes of the Gironde. Dry stone walls echo the rows of vines, indicating the four enclosures of Climens that surround the château’s 30 hectares situated on the appellation’s highest land where limestone outcrops are abundant.
Winemaking
In a region destined to produce noble late harvest sweet wines, ripeness is almost just the beginning. The most important is the noble rot which appears with the occurrence of Botrytis Cinerea. The misty mornings and the sun favour the development of this microscopic mushroom or fungus, which penetrates into the cracks of the grapes’ skin. It triggers an unbelievable aromatic expansion, brings body, balances the acidities and changes the nature of the sugars. Everything becomes concentrated with this unusual alchemy. Undesirable everywhere else, feared in every vineyard, rot is providential in Sauternes.
It is a costly miracle, however: noble rot gives low and irregular yields and makes the wine maker’s job unbelievably difficult! For beneath the name Botrytis Cinerea, hides two facets of the same fungus that provoke both grey rot and noble rot...
In order for Botrytis to develop in its noble form, there has to be a meeting of draconian conditions: a micro-climate in which slight humidity and sunshine alternate, a well-drained terroir, a grape variety that is suitable for it, a sufficiently high level of ripeness for the grapes ... To these initial indispensable conditions, one must obviously add the autumnal weather conditions: if it’s too dry Botrytis will not make an appearance; if it’s too wet it turns to grey rot! In between these two extremes, anything (and everything) is possible. It goes without saying that the oceanic climate of the Bordeaux region is a constant threat to producers especially as old Lord Botrytis does not make regular appearances. Producers in Sauternes therefore carry out selective picking (‘tries’), in other words successive trips down each row to harvest only the grapes that are sufficiently concentrated by the noble rot.
