Château La Conseillante, Pomerol, 2022
Marielle Cazaux and consultant oenologist Thomas Duclos have produced a velvety and highly textural La Conseillante. This has become a hallmark of Marielle's wines - there is always a generosity and enveloping character to the velour fruit. The 2022 is particularly successful. It opens with notions of creme de mûre, gravelly cassis, violets and eucalyptus. A beautiful, broad, layered palate of ripe plum and griotte cascades over the palate, leading to ripe, nuanced tannins laced with fruits and minerals. Harmonious, refreshing and with a wonderful saline finish, the 2022 La Conseillante is a fabulously detailed and fulsome wine. Produced from a blend of 87% Merlot and 13% Cabernet Franc with a modest 14% alc.
critic reviews
The 2022 La Conseillante definitely has one of the more mineral-driven aromatics, vibrant and focused, complex and mercurial. The palate is medium-bodied with finely spun tannins, a keen line of acidity, beautifully balanced with an almost citrus-fresh finish. This fans out beautifully, excellent from start to finish. One of the best Right Bank wines in 2022. Tasted blind at the Southwold tasting in London.
The blend is 87% Merlot and 13% Cabernet Franc, and the élevage was 70% in new oak, with 3% in Tava amphorae and the rest in second-fill barrels. A beautiful sense of purity on the nose, showing defined black cherry fruits with a violet fragrance, with touches of dark chocolate, slate minerals and dry sage. A very confident start to the palate, with a polished substance carrying an immediately fragrant core of dark red cherry, bright raspberry, rose and violet notes, with a very fine and powdery backbone of tannins, as well as vivacious acidity. A cool, correct and precise style, fragrant but with a little more dominance from the structure on a second look, powdery but grippy. It thus finishes with a rich and drying tannic grip, but never loses the sense of freshness that comes from the wine’s firm acid profile. A strong and fresh interpretation of the vintage which will need a decade of cellar time as a minimum. The alcohol on the label is 14%.
The 2022 La Conseillante is a remarkable wine that has the potential to emerge as one of the wines of the vintage. A blend of 87% Merlot and 13% Cabernet Franc, it unfurls in the glass with deep aromas of black raspberries and mulberries mingled with notions of rose petals, violets, orange zest and mint. Medium to full-bodied, deep and layered, it's velvety and enveloping, with a textural attack that segues into a multidimensional mid-palate that's framed by sweet, powdery tannins, concluding with a long, saline finish. Checking in at a very healthy pH of 3.65 and 14% alcohol, it is a beautifully supple, suave wine that retains all this estate's signature elegance but in a slightly deeper-pitched and broader-shouldered format than the profound 2020. Congratulations to winemaker Marielle Cazaux, consulting enologist Thomas Duclos, the Nicolas family led by Jean-Valmy, and all the team at La Conseillante who have firmly established this estate at the very top of Pomerol's qualitative hierarchy in recent vintages.