Montlandrie 2023

Including a new parcel that brought more Cabernet into the blend, the 2023 Château Montlandrie is based on 55% Merlot, 25% Cabernet Sauvignon, and the rest Cabernet Franc, aged in 50% new French oak. This deep purple-hued beauty has a classy, perfumed, complex, and incredibly elegant personality, offering ripe black raspberries, sappy flowers, blood orange, and a beautiful limestone-like minerality. It's medium-bodied, pure, layered, and graceful, with fine tannins, remarkable purity, and a great finish. This is one of those hidden gems that readers will love. Drink bottles over the coming 15-20 years. Drink 2026-2045.

The 2023 Montlandrie is another seriously beautiful wine from sisters Constance and Noëmie Durantou. This is the first with a high percentage of Cabernet Sauvignon, which comes through in the wine's dark persona and strong savory inflections. The wine's depth, textual presence and dynamic personality are all exceptional by any measure.

Sophisticated for the appellation, with blackberries, hazelnuts and a hint of salt. It's medium-bodied and polished, with refinement and length. Nice energy.

This is a serious Montlandrie, has far more Cabernet Sauvignon than usual, and shows a gorgeously savoury ethereal quality, with slow burn release of black fruits, oyster shell salinity, raspberry leaf and peony aromatics, precise, a slow burn, enjoyable. 36hl/h yield. Noëmie Durantou winemaker.

A plot of Cabernet Sauvignon planted in 2021 came on line this year, so there is more Cabernet Sauvignon in the blend of the 2023 Montlandrie than usual. The blend is 25% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20% Cabernet Franc, and 55% Merlot and it is deep garnet-purple in color. It charges out of the glass with powerful notes of baked plums, black cherry preserves, and black raspberries, followed by hints of mint tea, clove oil, Indian spices, and fragrant soil. The full-bodied palate is jam-packed with expressive black fruit layers, framed by velvety tannins and bags of freshness, finishing long and opulent.

The 2023 Montlandrie has a bright and lively bouquet with ebullient red berry fruit, crushed stone and rose petal. The palate is medium-bodied with supple tannins, a fine bead of acidity, very harmonious, with a silky smooth finish. What a gorgeous Castillon Côtes de Bordeaux. Tasted twice, with consistent notes.

A blend of 55% Merlot, 20% Cabernet Franc and 25% Cabernet Sauvignon matured 50% in new oak, the 2023 Montlandrie offers up aromas of flowers, wild dark berries and mulberries with a touch of reduction. Medium to full-bodied, dense and rich with a concentrated core of fruit, it�s enrobing and charming with structuring tannins and a long, licorice and smoke-inflected finish. It will offer a broad drinking window.