Château Larmande 2016

The 2016 vintage in Saint-Émilion

Vintage benchmark: 96/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A dry summer on full water reserves gave fresh, deep wines, magical on the asteria limestone.

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

Straightforward wine, elegant and floral, which develops spicy notes on the nose and in the mouth, carried by red berries and thin tannins. Balanced, nice acidity, fresh and juicy all tasting long.

The vintage

After a difficult start to the year, with a particularly wet winter and spring (rainfall reaching 800 mm, the equivalent of a full year), the summer was one of the hottest and driest recorded since 1990. The rains of early September and the Indian summer allowed the grapes to reach perfect ripeness, with a high yield comparable to the 1982 vintage.

Budbreak was early, in the last days of March. The spring was cool and damp; around 25 May, warm days encouraged vine growth and an even flowering. The summer was hot and particularly dry, with an 80-day drought (24 June - 12 September). Veraison, slow and late, only really began after the rain of 4 August. On 13 and 14 September, about 40 mm of rain helped control alcohol levels and malic acid; cool nights (10/15 °C) and warm days (25/30 °C) favoured the ripening of skins and seeds while preserving the freshness of the fruit.

Harvest began on 22 September with the young Merlot on sand, continued a week later with the Merlot on clay, then the Cabernets, until 18 October. The berries were sorted by hand; extractions were moderate to preserve the fruity character and freshness of the musts.

Blend of the 2016 vintage

Figures from the 2016 sheet

• 14 % vol.Alcohol
• 45 hl/haYield
• 25 yrsVine age

Winemaking

Manual harvesting. Manual sorting. Gravity transfer of the harvest. Parallelepipedal double-walled stainless steel vats, temperature controlled. Malolactic fermentation in barrels for 40% of the harvest.

Ageing

18 months in French oak barrels: 60% new barrels, 40% one-year-old barrels.

Terroir

Limestone and clay, ancient sands, siliceous clay. Hillside vineyard, 1,200 metres from Saint-Emilion.