Malescot Saint Exupéry 2020

Lots of blackcurrants and blueberries on the nose, together with walnuts and chocolate. Full-bodied and very layered, with super depth and plushness, offering currant, crushed-stone and bitter-chocolate flavors. Very lush for this wine, but velvety and structured at the same time. Needs four to six years of bottle age. Try after 2027.

The 2020 Malescot Saint-Exupéry is oaky on the nose. At the moment, the wood occludes the fruit profile, but it will assimilate with time, and there is satisfying delineation. The palate is medium-bodied with a sweeter entry than its peers, perhaps due to more extraction or later picking. It retains decent freshness, although it just needs to muster a little more restraint and grace, which may well develop with bottle age. Tasted blind at the annual Southwold tasting.2027 - 2047

Deep garnet-purple colored, the 2020 Malescot St. Exupery is a little sluggish and broody to begin, before cutting loose with notes of crushed red currants, warm cassis, and black raspberries, followed by hints of cardamom, violets, and black pepper. Medium to full-bodied, rich and plush, it delivers bags of opulent black and red fruits and fantastic persistence.

Enjoyable black fruit aromatics on the nose, they do a good job here of soft pedalling the extraction on the attack, although by the mid palate we are in bitter chocolate and liquorice territory. Again, concentration and intensity is an overriding signature of the vintage. 3% Petit Verdot completes the blend. A yield of 31hl/ha.

Drinking Window 2026 - 2040

The 2020 is a blend of 49% Merlot, 44% Cabernet Sauvignon, 4% Cabernet Franc and 3% Petit Verdot that will be aged in barrel for 15 months. The yield is 31hl/ha this year, with the harvest running until 2nd October. Deep ruby colour. The nose is sweet and ripe, with baked plum and clafoutis notes. The palate is succulent and generous. Sweetly spiced with no hard edges, this full and rounded wine is hedonistic without excess. Plush and ripe to the finish.

(49% M, 44%, 4% CF, 3% PV; 31hl/ha; 13.5% ABV; 70% new)
Blackberry-sweet to smell; full, fresh, and finely, if firmly tannic; deep and sweet in ripe black fruit, full, round, long to taste, ample and satisfying, a gentle subtlety of taste, mouthcoating, sapid, and with lovely fruit length; a most seductive abundance of ripe Merlot flesh, well-contained and defined by its Cabernet tannin frame. This will make a delicious bottle in its fruit-rich, fulsome style. At 49% there is a particularly high proportion of Merlot this year (it is usually more like one third), but Jean-Luc simply said, “The Cabernets were very small and lacking juice, and the Merlots so very good, so, why not include them all?” Why not indeed, and the result speaks for itself. You’ll be able to drink this relatively early, but it will keep and age well. 2028–50+.