Château Ausone 2012

The 2012 vintage in Saint-Émilion

Vintage benchmark: 90/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: Merlots brought in just before the rain made for a vintage markedly more successful than on the Left Bank.

Overall reading of the year’s season across Saint-Émilion. An estate can depart from it sharply, in frost or hail years, where two neighbours did not make the same vintage. What this particular wine actually gave is on its technical sheet and in the scores above.

Tasting

Often a little austere and compact in its youth, Ausone is wonderfully elegant, powerful and complex at maturity and drinks well for twenty years and much longer after bottling.

Blend of the 2012 vintage

Figures from the 2012 sheet

• 33 hl/haYield
• 50 yrsVine age
• 18,000 bottlesProduction

Winemaking

Alcoholic fermentation is carried out successively by many yeast species. Extraction is done by gentle pumping over, two to three rack-and-return operations and sometimes one or two punching downs. The wine is then racked into new barrels made by three coopers. Once malolactic fermentations are completed at the end of January, the barrels are lowered into the superb ageing cellar located in a former quarry, where they remain for about twenty months before bottling. Vinifications at Ausone are carried out plot by plot and the final blends are made at the end of February or beginning of March.

Terroir

The vineyard faces east-southeast. The plots lie on two distinct geological formations: a quarter of their total area on asteria limestone and three quarters on the Fronsadais molasse. The vines have an average age of 50 years. The planting is 45% Merlot and 55% Cabernet Franc. The vineyard is located on a steep hillside facing east-southeast. At the top of the slope it is surrounded by a belt of rocks that shelters it from the north and west winds.