Winemaker: Nicole Tapon
AOC: Clairet de Bordeaux
Vintage: 2010
Vol: 12.5 %
RS: 0 g/L
Total Production: 3,000 bottles
Cépages: Merlot Noir, Cabernet Franc
Vine Age: 50 years
Soils: Limestone clay
Vegan: No
Allergènes: No
Closure: Cork + Foil
Drinking Window: The next 15 years
Ethos: Certified Organic from 2012
Producer: Nicole is the 16th generation of the Tapon family to make wine on Bordeaux’s iconic Right Bank. Despite the region’s reputation for red wines, Nicole is best known for her ‘Clairet de Bordeaux’ -a rare style of deeply coloured, ageworthy, dry Rosé. During our visit in 2021, we tasted the 2018, 2013, 2010 and 2006 each wine provided a compelling, gastronomic experience that combined the best of mature Claret with a fragrant, fresh lift.
Viticulture and Vinification: During the vinification of the best parcelles of red must, a blend is made from bled-off juice (saignée), which finishes its ferment in French oak barriques.
Points/Reviews/Tasting: Jancis Robinson (18)
So dark that I mistook it for a red wine when I unpacked the box. It's more the colour of raspberry vinegar, with bright mahogany tints. I don't think I've ever tasted a rosé, or even a clairet, quite like this. It smells like strawberries, bruised and poached in balsamic vinegar, sprinkled with baharat spices. It's pressed-pomegranate juice, rich with all its phenolics, roast beetroot, souk spice, dried rose petals and the dust in an old stone chapel, long abandoned. Dried cranberries. Rose hips in vermouth and marzipan syrup. Yet the wine is dry, dry, dry (not remotely drying). The tannins have the gossamer-fine fragility of old voile; susurrant, the patina of age shining on their ever-translucent weave. It's long and bears the proud structural senescence of old bordeaux, but there is a wickedly youthful, playful glint of brightness in that fruit. Two wines immediately come to mind when I taste this: old Musar red and Tondonia Gran Reserva rosado. It stands shoulder to shoulder with them. A remarkable wine. It will be wonderful with food (lamb, carpaccio, steak tartare, sashimi), but, equally, this wine, sipped in quiet contemplation, watching the sun go down, would have so much to whisper in your ear that you would be silent for hours, just listening. Drink 2015 – 2026 (TC)