Château Laroque 2024

The 2024 vintage in Saint-Émilion

Vintage benchmark: 87/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A difficult flowering and a wet summer reduced the harvest: light, aromatic wines, to be drunk early.

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

"An opulent, bewitching nose of marked sensuality, mingling black fruit, graphite and dark chocolate. On the palate, a sumptuous, velvety, fluid and tapered texture caresses the palate with saline notes." Le Figaro

The vintage

Merlots from 27 September to 7 October, Cabernets Franc on 8 October. Yield of 41 hl/ha; 44% of the grapes and juices selected for the grand vin.

Blend of the 2024 vintage

Figures from the 2024 sheet

• 13.4 % vol.Alcohol
• 41 hl/haYield

Winemaking

Whole-berry vatting by gravity. Plot-by-plot vinification in small concrete vats.

Ageing

Traditional ageing on fine lees, partly in barrels (50% new) and partly in oak foudres, for 16 to 18 months.

Terroir

Around the château there is a large area of outcropping limestone plateau, also found at Clos Fourtet or Château Canon, which gives chestnut-coloured clays. Further east lies a mantle of red clays, Agenais molasse similar to that of Pavie-Macquin or Troplong-Mondot. The clay terraces to the east and the west-facing slopes are made up of the Fronsadais molasse that has made the reputation of Ausone or Tertre-Roteboeuf. A thin part of the plain vineyard, whose wines do not go into the grand vin of Laroque, consists of brown soils resulting from the erosion of the limestone ridge tops.