Discover the new vintage of the Château Le Châtelet… Simply named “Le Châtelet”, an invitation to hedonistic pleasure.
Discover the new vintage of the Château Le Châtelet…
Simply named "Le Châtelet", an invitation to hedonistic pleasure.
The vintage has been designed to extract the very essence of our exceptional terroir.
We have selected 3 representative plots of our vineyard :
A plot made of « Merlot » grapes on clay ground
A plot made of « Merlot » grapes on limestone ground
A plot of « Cabernet franc » grapes on limestone ground
These three different plots are farmed from the pruning of the grapes in winter. We reduce the numbers of buds to three on each part of the grape. On the same way, we remove the leaves from the vine very early on both side. We keep maximum six bunches of grape per vine.
The production is self-limited to 30 hl/ha maximum.
The grape-harvesting is exclusively hand-made and it is taken very fastly to the cellar to avoid oxydation. Once in the cellar, every bunch of vine is selected seed by seed, by 8 persons.
The great oenological innovation of the vintage is the wine-making process.
The selected grapes are directly dispatched to wine-making french oak barrels changed every year contrary to other vintages where the grapes are dispatched to wine vat. The barrels have a capacity of 225 to 400 litters.
The barrels are mounted on wheel-equiped supports for the grapes to rotate every day, for the maceration of the grapes.
With this particular process, the integrity of the fruit is respected. This process doesn’t contain mechanical actions, the grapes are not manipulated. The aromatic potential of the grapes is totally kept.
During the five weeks wine-making stage, the grapes in barrels are hand-rotated every 8 hours (3 times a day).
Once the alcoholic fermentation over, we proceed to the flowing of the grapes (the drops juice) to smaller barrels. Every small barrel is completed with its own squeezed juice.
The malolactic fermentation takes place in these small barrels. Every week, the barrels rotate for the lees to be suspended and for the wine to become more complex and fruity. The aroma in the mouth is much more intensified, so the pleasure.
When the malolactic fermentation is finished, the wine is racked to remove the biggest lees and to get an ageing on thin lees. The rotation of the barrels is continuing until April.
The ageing lasts on a 20 months period before bottling. During this period, the grapes are slightly filtered (20 microns).
The first vintage which benefits from this process is the 2007 vintage, voluntarily self-limited to 100 boxes.
This vintage is considered as a real success by professionals and wine-lovers while the tastings we organised.
All this work and these innovations have not been made in vain.
We are highly persuaded of this optimal wine-making process and today we are very motivated by the results obtained and congratulations.
The annual production for the next vintages are voluntarily self-limited to 200 boxes.
A great new wine is born !
