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Viinin Kuvailu
The Story
Feminine and seductive, due to the dominance of the Merlot, Château GAZIN's wines can be enjoyed after a few years in the bottle, but usually they are worth laying down for fifteen, twenty years or more. Their sumptuous generosity offers a wide aromatic range of red and black fruit which harmonizes with their intense crimson or garnet red colour. They typically offer hints of plum, chocolate, coffee or liquorice, with aromas of almonds, toast, tobacco and vanilla, and a minty freshness.
With maturity they develop a spicy nose, with a hint of truffles, notes of undergrowth, game, fur and leather
The harvests are carried out by hand, as each plot reaches perfect ripeness. The grapes undergo an initial sorting in the vineyard, carried out by the pickers.
Two further sorting stages take place in the vat room, before and after removal of the stalks, to optimize the quality of the fruit.
Alcoholic fermentation takes place in small concrete vats, separated by grape variety and plot, the juice and skins are then left to macerate for two to three weeks.
The free-run wine is then drawn off and kept separate from the wine obtained by pressing the residue ("marc"). The second fermentation, or malolactic fermentation, is then carried out, each grape variety being kept separate, either in barrels or vats, depending on the quality of the batches.The wines are then transferred to oak barrels (50% new barrels).
They mature for eighteen months, during which the wines are progressively blended during meticulous rackings approximately every three months.
The contact with the fine lees and the oak tannins gradually adds structure and complexity, enabling the production of wines that can be laid down and that will improve over time.he estate can produce up to 100,000 bottles.
A second wine, an AOP Pomerol, l'Hospitalet de Gazin, was created in 1986 so that Château GAZIN could be made with only the best grapes from each harvest.After being bottled and placed in wooden cases on the property, the wine is distributed all over the world by wine merchants in Bordeaux. 86% of Château GAZIN's production is sold to wine lovers outside of France.
Wine Information
The 2012 vintage represents a 25% reduction in grape production as compared to 2011. With 31.9 hl per hectare (as opposed to 43 hl in 2011), the vineyard was still able to produce 54,000 bottles produced with 100% merlot blend. Indeed, the merlot harvest that began on September 20th and concluded on October 4th brought in perfectly ripe grapes of excellent quality after the first rains of September refreshed the clusters, lowered the temperature, and slightly raised production by plumping up the berries. Truth be told, other than the familiar old maladies that all vintners contended with in the spring and in early July, the year 2012 was dry, too dry, and that’s never good for grapes.
On the other hand, the cabernets were gathered on October 10, before they were perfectly mature, because of the very abundant rains (with a temperature of 19°) that very quickly threatened to provoke rot that in a matter of days could have irreversibly degraded the quality of the grapes. So the harvest was a little sudden and the grapes were not quite mature, which explains why there are no cabernets in the main 2012 wine, but only in the second wine, the Hospitalet de Gazin, which yielded 23,000 bottles.
This 2012 vintage is promising to be a bit like the 2009s and 2010s: alcohol level of 14.5 degrees that you don’t even notice either in the aroma or in the taste because of a high, yet silky, presence of tannins that balance the wine. Also, this “pure merlot” (which is by no means a betrayal of the Pomerol style since merlot traditionally dominated the label) has produced a wine that is of course full-bodied, well-rounded, and supple without being heavy, and features a fresh aroma and taste. This is nothing like those merlots you sometimes find where heaviness and power rhyme with lack of finesse and absence of complexity.
The bordeaux appearance is quite complete and features black reflections. Fresh aroma, full of red and black berry: raspberry, cherry, and currant, finished with a subtle woody note (50% new barrels). To the taste, the wine is ample, elegant, smooth, lingering, and refined, leaving a fresh and light after-effect, with a lingering finish, lacking in high acidity, but offering supple tannins because of how well they are aged.
You can enjoy the 2012 vintage right away, even without decantation, but it will be better after aging 5 or 6 years (2018), during which time it will develop a complement of classic Pomerol notes: humus, truffle, leather...It should not be stored longer than 15/18 years, even in good storage conditions.
Vuosikerta 2012
The 2012 Bordeaux vintage report.
The 2012 Bordeaux vintage is a year for vineyard management and workers. Call it a winemakers vintage, or change your tune and call it vineyard managers vintage. Either descriptor works perfectly. Wineries with the financial capacity to take the necessary measures in the vineyards during the season, coupled with the willingness to severely downgrade unripe grapes, will produce the best wines. Even then, it will be a difficult vintage with small quantities of wine. From start to finish, the 2012 Bordeaux vegetative season and harvest were stressful for the winemakers, the vines and with the grapes being vinified, the winemakers.
The 2012 Bordeaux vintage did not get off to a good start. After a cold winter and a wet spring, the April rains soaked the Bordeaux wine region. After the April rains, there were outbreaks of mildew, which required spraying. The month of May was warmer than April. Things calmed down a bit in June. All this resulted in late and uneven flowering. This resulted in small clusters of berries that ripened at different times, lowering quantities and requiring serious work in the vines and intensive sorting at harvest.
Although a growing season is never over until it is, uneven flowering never bodes well. Late flowering pushed back the entire vintage by 2 to 3 weeks, depending on the château. Generally speaking, late harvests are not generally a harbinger of good things to come.
If everything that happened up to the end of June didn't offer what happened next offered additional challenges with the 2012 Bordeaux vintage. After an average July, Bordeaux experienced a heat wave torrid weather and drought in August and September which stressed the vines, particularly the young vines. At one point, temperatures soared to 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees! Other days crossed 100 degrees. It was extremely hot and dry. The vines stopped and the vintage was on track to be even later than expected. Towards the end of September, things improved with the much-hoped-for combination of warm days, cool nights and desperately needed rain, which helped nourish the vines. The first few days of October offered reasonably warm temperatures during the day, coupled with cooler weather at night for growers with Merlot ready to pick.
In the Médoc, you had to hurry and wait. Tom Petty could have exploded with “Waiting is The Hardest Part” because producers had to wait because Cabernet Sauvignon had difficulty maturing. It was already October. Conventional wisdom says that at one point there was little to gain by waiting and more to lose, so the 2012 Bordeaux harvest began to take place. Some estates began picking young Merlot in late September, but most held back until around October 1, and a few producers waited a week or more. Most growers brought in all their fruit by mid-October.
Pomerol is usually the first appellation to harvest, due to their Merlot dominated vines. It is interesting to note that the picking took place simultaneously on the left bank on October 1st. Many properties in Pessac Léognan started their harvest before Pomerol. Château Haut Brion began work on their young Merlot vines on September 17th and Château Haut Bailly was not far behind, with a start date of September 27th. Most castles were in the thick of things on October 4, although Domaine de Chevalier waited until October 8.
While the pleasant, cooler weather was initially forecast to continue, on October 8 things changed quickly when massive amounts of rain fell across the entire Bordeaux region. With accompanying temperatures in the mid-60s and higher in some areas, winemakers were concerned about the potential for Botrytis, due to the humid tropical conditions. At this point, the fruit had to be picked, regardless of the state of ripeness. Like last year with the 2011 Bordeaux vintage, maturation was uneven. It wasn't just the bunches that weren't ripening, individual grapes in bunches reached varying degrees of ripeness, making sorting more important than ever. Optical sorting was used more than ever with the 2012 Bordeaux harvest.
