
Château Cantemerle 2009
Ageing potential16-19 years

Ageing potential16-19 years
Vintage benchmark: 98/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)
Vintage character: A sun-drenched season from start to finish gave opulent, fleshy wines, immediately appealing yet built for the cellar.
Overall reading of the year’s season across Haut-Médoc. 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.
Lovers of young wine will be able to start enjoying this beautiful bottle from 2012, provided it is decanted three hours before serving. They will find these aromas of spices and black fruits, typical of the vintage, this contradictory impression of a wine that is both concentrated and elegant, lively and soft at the same time. On its own, its deep and chic garnet color announces the great wine, which the nose confirms with its complexity. Good length and fresh finish. Lovers of more mature wines will be able to cellar this 2009 Cantemerle, and open in five, ten or fifteen years, a bottle of a distinguished wine, with assertive but delicate aromas, perfectly representative of its vintage and its terroir.
Shares for this vintage, as recorded on the 2009 technical sheet. The vineyard itself is planted with cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, petit verdot — a vintage blend departs from the area under vine as the year dictates.
The production of each plot is vinified separately in large oak vats favoring a slow and gentle extraction of tannins.
The wines are then aged in barrels for twelve months, then lightly clarified before being bottled at the château.
The soil at Cantemerle is siliceous gravel. This gravel, the product of the ancient erosion of the Pyrenees by the Garonne, is one of the essential elements of a quality terroir. It makes for poor soils, and the vine must struggle if it is to produce concentrated grapes. These soils of sand and pebbles are also very free-draining and play an active part in ripening the grapes, since they reflect the sun's rays and retain at night the heat accumulated during the day. As they age, the vines send their roots deeper into the soil and express more fully the typicity of the terroir that carries them.
Availability, allocations and terms: the Compagnie Médocaine will reply promptly. The estate and vintage are already filled in in the message.
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Sheet checked on September 21, 2026. Technical data: the estate’s VinCod sheets. Critic scores: sources cited above, with their date. Vintage benchmarks and character: Compagnie Médocaine’s own editorial read. Soils and relief, where shown: the Compagnie Médocaine’s parcel survey and the Mapbox/IGN terrain model.