Château Cheval Blanc

Château Cheval Blanc, St Emilion, 2023

Name: Château Cheval Blanc, St Emilion
Brand: Château Cheval Blanc

97-99/100

The Wine Independent

96-98/100

Vinous

Available Vintages

all 2024

delivery

in bond

Justerini & Brooks Tasting note

The Cheval Blanc 2024 opens with quite a reserved bouquet initially. With air, notes of crème de mûre, followed by rich aromas of crème de cassis, sandalwood, mint, white pepper, stones, violets, and iris emerge. It presents a fascinating juxtaposition between pure, seductively textured griotte fruit, and something wilder with suggestions of dried flowers, herbs and garrigue. It is quite strict and shy, somewhat modest, yet unmistakably a very smart wine, with great depth to its mineral-inflected fruit. Taut and linear with a certain nervy tension to the mid-palate awash with notes of cranberry, crushed rocks, and graphite. This was a labour of love, extreme hard work and draconian selection (34% of the crop was sold as bulk wine), conveying monastic, cerebral qualities. As one would expect from Pierre-Olivier and team, the tannins are unimpeachable, contributing to an exquisite structure and a prolonged, saline finish. A superb Cheval Blanc that will reward patience.

delivery information

GUARANTEED PROVENANCE

Provenance in fine wine

When it comes to purchasing wine, provenance is of upmost importance. A wine’s history – where it’s sourced from and how it’s been stored – can have an enormous influence on the eventual enjoyment it provides. At Justerini & Brooks, we can trace nearly every case back to the domaine, estate or Château it originally came from; we ship from over 200 wine producers throughout the world.

Wines not bought directly from the vineyard are either sourced from trusted suppliers, with whom we share the same philosophy and rigour in buying, or from our own network of Cellarers customers. These customers’ wines are stored in optimal conditions in Octavian Corsham and, in the vast majority of cases, have been stored by us since the wine was first shipped. We do not purchase wine from auctions.

We feel it is equally important to for our customers that the case they buy and leave in storage with us is exactly the same case they subsequently have delivered. This may sound obvious and straightforward, yet we are one of very few merchants to have taken measures to ensure this.

We have created a system where every case is independent, thereby ensuring a trail of ownership and peace of mind for every customer.

The Journey

Justerinis ensures that every case of wine stored with Cellarers (Wines) Ltd has a unique identifier and customer’s name, almost unheard of in the industry as it is expensive to administer. These details are printed and placed on every case which is logged and recorded under your account name and kept in the world’s most renowned storage facility, Octavian Corsham.

This information is sent from our systems to the warehouse every day to ensure the trail of ownership is verified and upheld.

While customer reserves are stored in Corsham, our physical stocks are kept in Hoddesdon, further providing a geographical separation between customers’ wines with Cellarers and Justerinis’ own stock.

Further Reassurance

Cellarers (Wines) Ltd is a legally separate limited company from Justerini & Brooks which currently holds approximately £450 million worth of customer reserves. It is fully insured to catastrophic loss. Many merchants will state that wine in their care is fully insured, but in reality this is on an individual case basis with insufficient cover for total loss as this is prohibitively expensive. The cover provided by Octavian and Justerini & Brooks is unmatched.

Cellarers (Wines) Ltd is audited by PwC every year.

Critic Reviews

97-99/100

Lisa Perrotti-Brown,

The Wine Independent

The 2023 Cheval Blanc, accounting for 75% of this year's crop, is deep garnet-purple in color. After a little swirling, the nose erupts with an atomic perfume of Morello cherries, wild blueberries, black raspberries, and ripe plums leading to a fragrant undercurrent of rosebud tea, menthol, star anise, and cinnamon stick. The medium-bodied palate is fantastically fresh and graceful, delivering super-fine-grained tannins and just enough tension to support the red, black, and blue fruit layers, finishing on a lingering mineral note. This is magnificent. The blend is 52% Merlot, 46% Cabernet Franc, and 2% Cabernet Sauvignon, with pH 3.80.

drinking window 2030 - 2060

date of review 05/2024

96-98/100

Neal Martin,

Vinous

The 2023 Cheval Blanc is uncharacteristically backward on first meeting, and it takes time to really fire up its engines. Quite strict and focused (surprisingly so), the bouquet reveals black fruit, a touch of bilberry, with just a whiff of iris flower. The palate has wonderful symmetry, outstanding mineralité and ample tension. It's extremely pure, with less weight than the 2022 but perhaps a touch more nerve. Modestly grippy on the finish, this "serious" Cheval Blanc will deserve several years in bottle. It's cerebral…and I like that. The 2023 is very different from the 2022—a beautiful minor chord.

drinking window 2030 - 2060

date of review 04/2024

product details

Specifications

Country:

Region:

Appellation:

Producer:

style:

Grape Variety:

abv:

12.5%

allergen information

This product may contain sulphites. Full allergen information is available upon request, please call our Customer Relations Team on +44 (0)20 7484 6430.