1996 | Château Cheval Blanc | Saint-Emilion

The wine starts out powerful and elegant on the palate. The tannins are luscious, but fine-grained, and the fruity flavours go into quite a long aftertaste that remains fresh.

Reviews:

• Falstaff: Dark, luminous garnet; very intense cassis notes, some blackberry, very clear; sweet tannin, unfolds with great length, spicy notes in the finale.

Producer Information

Château Cheval Blanc is a highly lauded wine estate in the Saint-Émilion region of northeast Bordeaux. It is certainly the most famous Cabernet Franc-based wine in the world, albeit often alongside very similar levels of Merlot. Typically, the "grand vin" (the estate's eponymous wine) is lush and full bodied with great weight of fruit. It tends to require ten years of bottle age and the best vintages can last half a century or more. The second wine of the estate is Le Petit Cheval. Vines have been grown since the 14th Century at this spot but the vineyard as it is known today took shape in the 19th Century when the core plots were added to by purchases from the nearby Figeac estate. Subsequent replantings established the atypical half-Merlot, half-Cabernet Franc proportions. Cheval Blanc gained its first medal at the 1862 Universal Exhibition in London – the first of a series of successes building its reputation and achieving price levels comparable to the Médoc first growths, which paved the way for a château to be built on the estate. In the first classification of Saint-Émilion wines in 1955, Cheval Blanc was awarded the highest possible rating and remains a Premier Grand Cru Classé A. In 1998, after 166 years of continuous family ownership, Bernard Arnault, the head of luxury goods firm LVMH, and the late Baron Albert Frère (a Belgian billionaire investor) jointly purchased the estate. The spectacular new cellar opened in 2011, with 52 concrete vats (replacing stainless steel) of differing sizes corresponding to different vineyard plots. The grand vin spends 16 to 18 months in new oak barrels from a variety of cooperages. Production totals 80,000 bottles annually. Classified with the top ranking of Premier Grand Cru Classé A since the inception of the Saint-Emilion classification in the 1950s, it famously withdrew from the ranking in 2022. Nonetheless, it is still regarded by many as one of the greatest – if not, the greatest – wines of the appellation (and in wider Bordeaux).

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