Château Haut-Bages Libéral 2016

The 2016 vintage in Pauillac

Vintage benchmark: 97/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A very wet winter followed by a sun-drenched summer produced a rare balance, combining the depth of great years with genuine freshness.

Overall reading of the year’s season across Pauillac. 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.

The vintage

The winter beat all the records in terms of rainfalls and it was one of the warmest one never recorded. The climatic incidents were many and made the vintage particularly difficult for the wine growers. We knew frost and a long pressure of the mildew till the end of June. This pressure was very complicated to manage in biodynamic farming but thanks to our attention we managed to limit the disease. In summer, an inverse trend is observed in July, indeed we had the driest summer of the decade. And in August till mid-September, the temperatures were above the averages. We notice that the water deficit strengthened the accumulation of anthocyanins in the berries and the warm temperatures favored the accumulation of sugar. And finally, the drop of the temperatures in mid-September allowed to protect the aromatic quality of the berries and to increase the rippening and the extraction of the tannins.

To conclude, after a complicated beginning, the hot and dry Summer conditions and the coolness of the late season allowed the berries to ripe in the best conditions and to produce a very balanced wine, rich in color and tannins.

The harvests began on September 27th and ended on October 19th, 2016.

Blend of the 2016 vintage

Figures from the 2016 sheet

• 30 hl/haYield
• 100,000 bottlesProduction

Winemaking

Traditional in stainless and concrete vats, whose volumes are proportional to the plots.

Ageing

40% new barrels, for 16 months

Terroir

The vineyard covers 30 hectares, half of which are located around the property, adjoining Château Latour. The other part of the vineyard is on the Bages plateau, in the south of Pauillac. The estate's plots are located in 2 areas, one made up of deep gravels and the other of clay-limestone and chalky limestone. This type of soil gives the wine its power and its mineral character. A large part of its fine deep-gravel land overlooks the Gironde estuary. These gravels were carried down by the river from the Pyrenees during the Quaternary era. They rest on a limestone bedrock.