Château Trotte Vieille 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 of very fine intensity. The astonishing freshness and aromatic complexity of this 2025 Trottevieille win us over instantly. Delicate notes of peony, smoke and cocoa blend with more indulgent notes of blackcurrant and blueberry. The singular expression of a great Saint-Émilion on the limestone plateau! The palate keeps all its promises. The attack is smooth, with a very pleasant freshness. It develops on a compact, crunchy texture that extends into a powerful, mellow and extremely flavourful finish. A very great Trottevieille.” - Valérie Lavigne and Axel Marchal, Doctors of Oenology

The vintage

Vintage 2025: a perfect balance between earliness and freshness.

The 2025 vintage looks superb, marked by a mild, dry winter that allowed winter work to be carried out in excellent conditions. After an early and homogeneous budburst, the clement, dry spring limited disease pressure. Flowering, early and quick, took place at the end of May in a favourable climate. The summer, marked by a real water deficit, favoured an equally early and homogeneous véraison. Hot and dry until mid-August, it then gave way to fine temperature ranges, ideal for perfecting the ripeness of the grapes.

The harvest, extremely early and starting in the very first days of September, took place in very good conditions. Vinifications, carried out with freshness in mind, give a wine with brilliant fruit and a dense colour, with a lovely freshness on the palate and long aromatic persistence.

Vine cycle: budburst on 20 March, flowering on 16 May, véraison on 3 July. Harvest: Merlots from 4 to 13 September, Cabernets from 15 to 19 September.

Blend of the 2025 vintage

Winemaking

Each plot of Château TrotteVieille is vatted in a dedicated tank to ensure optimal traceability. Vatting begins with a cold pre-fermentation maceration of the juice, skins and seeds. The maceration lasts only a few days and extracts the fruity aromas. Vinification continues with a low-temperature alcoholic fermentation (22 to 26°C), then a warm post-fermentation maceration (30 to 32°C) according to tasting. Racking and pressing then separate the liquid (juice) from the solids (skins, seeds) and draw the wine off the fermented must. Vinification ends with malolactic fermentation in barrels and in tanks.

Ageing

The wine is then aged in new French oak barrels (100% for the Premier Vin), before the final blending.

Terroir

Château TrotteVieille occupies a superb hillside east of the village of Saint-Émilion; the vineyard extends over a 12-hectare terroir planted with 49% Merlot, 46% Cabernet Franc and 5% Cabernet Sauvignon. It is one of the few estates still holding very old Cabernet Franc vines dating from before phylloxera.