Château Phélan Ségur, St Estèphe, 2016
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
The 2016 Phélan-Ségur has a more exotic but controlled bouquet, with brambly red fruit, star anise and cassis scents that blossom in the glass. Quite seductive. The palate is medium-bodied with sappy black fruit. Granular in texture, with strong pencil-shaving notes coming through on the Pauillac-like finish, I would afford this another couple of years in bottle. Tasted blind at the Southwold 10-Year-On tasting.