2020 Château Clinet
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Tasting notes
This is an immense and stunning wine. The nose is rich with milk chocolate and dried fruit – but also something fresh and crunchy about it. There’s an exoticism to the wine’s expressive perfume – almost shisha-like. On the palate, this is thick, full, round and intense – a weighty wine with a cocoa richness to it, but an incredible purity of dark berry and plummy fruit. There’s plenty of juicy acidity to offset the wine’s richness and mass of super-ripe tannins. Tight, dense and intense, this is a wine that needs time to fully unfurl.
Critic scores
Average Score
James Suckling
Julia Harding MW, jancisrobinson.com
More reviews and scores
Tasted blind. Black core. Intense dark fruit and a touch charry. Big, generous but juicy, too. Masses of everything, a bit oaky, yet all in balance for the long term. (JH)
The 2020 Clinet has quite a lot of new oak to be subsumed on the nose, and at the moment, it is disguising the DNA of this château. The palate is medium-bodied with grainy tannins and pointed acidity, slightly bitter but with a pleasing salinity on the finish. I am intrigued to see how this ages, but it is not showing its best right now (another bottle tasted in April 2024 performed much better). Tasted blind at the annual Southwold tasting.
The 2020 Clinet offers up aromas of minty cherries, blackberries and cassis mingled with hints of licorice, loamy soil and rose petals. Full-bodied, broad and rich, with a layered mid-palate underpinned by powdery tannins that assert themselves on the youthfully firm finish, it's impressively balanced for a wine at 15% alcohol, but it remains a rather burly, powerful Clinet.
About the producer
With Ronan Laborde at the helm, this property has become one of Pomerol’s most sought-after. He has increased the proportion of Cabernet Sauvignon, which historically represented half the vineyard area here.