Saint-Julien, Château Talbot 2015
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Why this wine
Saint-Julien's largest single-block vineyard, with 50-year-old vines, in a benchmark vintage for the decade. Talbot's house style is generous and velvety rather than austere, which means it can be opened young as readily as cellared. At classed-growth level it is one of the more forgiving wines to buy without a plan.
At a glance
- Grape
- Cabernet Sauvignon 66%, Merlot 31%, Petit Verdot 3%
- Region
- Bordeaux, France
- Alcohol
- 13.50%
- Body
- Full
- Acidity
- Medium
- Tannins
- Medium
- Sweetness
- Dry
- Drink
- Long (10-20 yrs)
- Pairs with
- Red Meat, Cheese
How it tastes
Bramble fruit with pencil shavings and graphite, and cocoa dusted over the dark fruit at the centre. Full in weight, though the tannins arrive as a caress rather than a grip, and the finish lifts with mineral and wild herb notes. Cabernet Sauvignon 66%, Merlot 31%, Petit Verdot 3%.
The producer
Château Talbot is a Fourth Growth in Saint-Julien, held by the Cordier family for over a century and led today by Nancy Bignon Cordier, with Jean-Michel Laporte as general manager since 2018 and Jean-Max Drouilhet making the wine since 2007. The 110 hectares form a single unbroken vineyard on alluvial gravel hilltops laid down by the Dordogne, planted at 7,700 vines per hectare with an average vine age of 50 years, trained on the Médoc double Guyot and held to 50 hl/ha; the estate carries Haute Valeur Environnementale Level 3 certification. Grapes are hand-harvested, passed through a warm-air tunnel to dry them, then sorted manually, optically and by flotation before parcel-by-parcel fermentation in temperature-controlled French oak vats, followed by 15 months in French oak barrels, half of them new. The 2015 season was sunny and dry across Bordeaux and gave concentrated, powerful wine with intense fruit and refined tannins.
Food and drinking
Serve at 16–18°C and decant an hour before pouring. Roast beef, rack of lamb, pigeon or a mature Cheddar suit it. Drinking well now and good for another ten to fifteen years.