Château Ausone 2025

The 2025 vintage in Saint-Émilion

Vintage benchmark: 94/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A dry summer and cool nights gave balanced merlots, pure and without excess ripeness.

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

The deep, striking violet colour. The nose offers an intense and rich bouquet of wild fruit, violet, spices and limestone freshness. On the palate, a crescendo: a balanced attack gives way to velvety tannins and an immense, sculpted finish.

The vintage

A warm, dry growing season gave small, thick-skinned, naturally concentrated berries, with preserved acidity at maturity. A series of micro-adjustments made in response to these conditions sharpened the definition of the vintage. The late June heatwave, exceptionally early in the cycle, proved to be a defining signature of this vintage. For the first time since 1994, every vat was assembled into a single grand vin: the most complete expression of Ausone's limestone terroir, a vintage in which nothing called for being set aside.

Harvest began on 2 September, the earliest date ever recorded at Ausone, before resuming on 8 September. Alcohol levels sit between 13% and 13.5%, with acidity perfectly preserved. The tannins are fine and structured. The Cabernet Francs stand out for their precision and elegance, while the Merlots, more sensitive to the heat but planted on the coolest terroirs, found a remarkable balance through rigorous management and carefully adjusted picking.

Blend of the 2025 vintage

Figures from the 2025 sheet

• 57 yrsVine age

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.

Ageing

20 months in new barrels in the underground quarries.

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.