Château Canon 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 colour is deep, luminous. The aromatic profile opens on a beautiful red fruit, both rich and fresh, unctuous yet cool - strawberry, blackberry, cherry. Fragrant floral notes envelop this core as it becomes more defined: crisp, juicy, sanguine.
2025 could have tipped everything over, yet freshness runs through the wine from start to finish, carried by the saline signature of the limestone. The tannins, discreet, silky, elegant, structure the whole without ever weighing it down. The fruit unfolds with amplitude, supported by a persistent tension that stretches the finish and prolongs its brightness.
The plateau frames, the wine falls into line. Ripeness settles in, freshness asserts itself. And balance, regal, prevails. A Canon of sovereign breadth.

The vintage

Weather conditions

Winter: relatively dry and mild

Spring: cool and wet, with a warm spell in late April

Summer: very dry with intense heat

Harvest: generally cool conditions

Harvest dates

Merlot: 28 August to 13 September

Cabernet Franc: 13 to 18 September

pH: 3.5

Blend of the 2025 vintage

Figures from the 2025 sheet

• 14 % vol.Alcohol
• 40 hl/haYield

Winemaking

Separate vinification, vatting using gravity, into conical shaped stainless steel vats with a double walled system for temperature control. Gravity run-off. Malolactic: 1/3 in new barrels and 2/3 in stainless steel vats.

Ageing

In French oak barrels, with medium or medium-long toasting.16 to 18 months - 49% new oak, 7% foudres. Racking via the bunghole

Terroir

Château Canon occupies a south-west-facing limestone terrace that makes up most of its surface area. A quarter of the estate lies on the slope of this hillside, which descends gently towards the Dordogne. This imposing mass of sedimentary rock is criss-crossed by numerous galleries, evidence of the quarrying of this building material since the 16th century. The site, which peaks at 87 metres, benefits from perfect ventilation and a walled enclosure that protects the vines from spring frosts. This setting allowed the château to be among the few estates to produce wine during the severe cold of 1766 and 1956.