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Wine Description
The Story
Partly an enclave of Château Pavie Decesse, on the Saint-Emilion clay limestone plateau, Château Bellevue-Mondotte is tiny in size, but has an "immense” terroir.
Overlooking the Dordogne valley from a height of 80 meters, this estate combines all the necessary characteristics for producing high quality wines: meagre soil, excellent south-facing sun exposure, fine natural drainage due to its position on a slope, protection from frost damage, and shelter from northerly winds.
Green harvesting, with an initial leaf thinning on the eastern side of the vines in late June and a second in mid-August on the western side.
The grapes are hand-picked and hand sorted. Alcoholic fermentation is triggered by indigenous yeast in temperature-controlled wooden vats. The wine is kept on the skins for 3 to 5 weeks. Malolactic fermentation takes place in barrel.
Château Bellevue-Mondotte is barrel-aged for six months on its lees (100% of new oak) for a total of aproximatively 24 months. Final blending takes place just before bottling, and the wine is neither fined nor filtered.
Vintage 2020
In Bordeaux, the heat resulted in early flowering. Also, this led to an early harvest after a very hot summer. As a starting point, there is great maturity in the grapes, and one can expect a more opulent vintage than in the last few years.
The summer this year has been the warmest since 1959, yet the rain has fallen at the right times during the growing season. The harvest took place two weeks before the norm and will yield grapes with high potential alcohol and the lowest acidity since the 2003 vintage. As they say in Bordeaux: "It has been a good and extreme growing season which hopefully also produces great wines".
