Vieux Chateau Certan 2018

Vieux Château Certan combines savoir-faire with exceptional soils. Coming mainly from the vineyard's oldest vines, Vieux Château Certan is a blend of the most excellent lots produced at the estate every year. The brilliance of the wine's hue, the richness of its aromas and the subtlety of its flavour bring it inimitable style. The wines of Vieux Château Certan possess natural concentration and require a few years' cellaring before the first bottles can be opened. As with the greatest Bordeaux wines, they can be enjoyed after 10 to 15 years of age.

While the tannins give this wine a strong character, the perfumed, ripe Cabernet Franc is so expressive and provides the wine with its structured, complex character. The spice from the wood aging shines through, but the weight of the fruit is impressive and adds elegance. There's long aging potential for this fabulous wine.

Blackberry and hints of plum with intense wet-earth and black-olive undertones. Bark and some iodine. Full-bodied with superb depth of fruit and structure. The palate is so broad with super tannins. This is a powerful and very structured VCC with fantastic depth and muscle—down-to-earth style. You can taste the soil.

The 2018 Vieux Château Certan comprises 70% Merlot and 30% Cabernet Franc, weighing in with 14.4% alcohol and an IPT (total polyphenol index) of 77. Medium to deep garnet-purple coloured, the nose is locked down tight at this youthful stage, requiring a lot of patient swirling to release a profound powerhouse of a perfume: preserved plums, blueberry compote, ripe black cherries and boysenberries, leading to suggestions of Indian spices, lilacs, espresso and licorice, plus a waft of sandalwood. The medium to full-bodied palate has a fantastic sense of cohesiveness. There are no edges to the seamless flow of exquisitely fine-grained tannins and perfectly knit acidity, beautifully framing the blue and black fruits, which are elegant and so rich at once. It finishes with many slowly lapping waves of minerals and exotic spices, which go on and on. It is a wine that is simply an experience not to be missed.

The flagship 2018 Vieux Château Certan is based on 70% Merlot and 30% Cabernet Franc and was brought up in roughly 50% new French oak. It tips the scale at 14.5% natural alcohol. This rock star of a Pomerol offers a kaleidoscopic array of red, black, and blue fruits, white truffle, spring flowers, tobacco, and crushed rock-like minerality on the nose. It has perfectly integrated oak, gorgeous concentration, building yet ultra-fine tannins, and not a hard edge to be found. I was able to follow this bottle for multiple days, and the large Cabernet Franc component became more dominant, yet it never indeed shut down and was always a joy to drink. Nevertheless, a good 7-8 years of bottle age are warranted, and it should evolve for 30-40 years in cold cellars.

Deep and richly spiced notes of cinnamon, smoked butterscotch, and Cabernet Franc-dominant savoury fruits. It expands in all directions, showing precision and delicately brushed tannins. They carried out the extremely careful selection from their 23 plots to ensure nothing at all raisined or over-concentrated made it into the wine, and indeed, there is not a trace of the drought in the flavours here, just a seductively rich texture to the body of the wine: a brilliant VCC, one to savour.