Château Phélan Ségur, St Estèphe, 2020

Name: Château Phélan Ségur, St Estèphe
Brand: Château Phélan Ségur
Price: 242.33 GBP

Available Vintages

all 2018 2020 2022 2023 2024

justerini & brooks tasting note

This completes a wonderful hat-trick for Phelan Segur. We haven’t always been fans, but chapeau to Véronique Dausse and Michel Rolland who keep raising the bar. 2018 was a huge, but pleasant surprise, 2019 was a confirmation that this was no fluke and 2020 once again highlights the potential of this Château. St Estèphe is blessed with plenty of clay in the subsoils so was better equipped to cope with the heat and drought. For the first time ever, Petit Verdot features in the blend. “Its expressive nose of remarkable freshness is an invitation to plunge into a ‘multicoloured and polyphonic’ world of fruit and flowers”. It is certainly dense, concentrated, powerful and extremely well put together. There’s an abundance of creamy, silky, dark fruit, nice and fleshy, but taut and sculpted with a glossy, seductive character and beautifully managed tannins. Another very successful Phelan.

critic reviews

96/100Neal Martin,Vinous

The 2020 Phélan Ségur has a very well-defined and seductive bouquet. There's real complexity here, with ebullient red fruit, crushed stone and dried rose petal scents, revealing more graphite aromas with aeration. The palate is medium-bodied, harmonious and poised, with very fine tannins, a keen line of acidity and a very svelte and persistent finish. This is a wine that seems unaware of just how good it is. Tasted blind at the annual Southwold tasting.

DRINKING WINDOW 2029 - 2060

date of review 11/2024

93/100William Kelley,Robert Parker Wine Advocate

The 2020 Phelan Segur is rich and generous, unwinding in the glass with aromas of sweet berries, cherries and plums mingled with hints of violets and spices and framed by creamy new oak. Medium to full-bodied, fleshy and layered, it's a concentrated, structured wine underpinned by a chassis of generously extracted tannin that lends it a somewhat youthfully chunky profile.

DRINKING WINDOW 2027 - 2045

date of review 04/2023

91/100Jane Anson,Inside Bordeaux

The second wine of Château Phélan Segur, named after its one-time Irish owner. Austere and more serious than most vintages, reflecting the character of the 2020 wines, but this is full of bright cassis and blueberry fruit, and is balanced, precise and layered with attractive rose petal and raspberry leaf character on the close of play. Harvest September 16 to October 1, from a mix of young vines across the vineyard, and a specific plot of older vines. Will continue to deliver over the next decade, give a few hours in a carafe before drinking if planning on opening soon, 3.7ph.

DRINKING WINDOW 2024 - 2032

date of review 02/2023

96/100Lisa Perrotti-Brown,The Wine Independent

The 2020 Phelan Segur is a blend of 54% Cabernet Sauvignon, 42% Merlot, 2% Cabernet Franc, and 2% Petit Verdot. Deep garnet-purple in color, it comes skipping out of the glass with youthful, carefree scents of redcurrant jelly, blackcurrant pastilles, black raspberries, and mulberries, plus suggestions of red roses, underbrush, crushed rocks, and graphite, plus a waft of cedar. The medium-bodied palate is super-intense yet wonderfully elegant, delivering arresting floral and mineral accents to the layers of red and black fruits, all framed by firm, very fine-grained tannins. The finish is fantastically long, fragrant, and uplifting.

DRINKING WINDOW 2024 - 2044

date of review 10/2022