Le Petit Clos - Clos Apalta - Chili 2015
Winter 2014 was considered as rainy in Apalta, with higher temperatures compared to the previous season, moving from a minimum of 4,5°C to 14,7°C maximum. This translate into 0.5°C more than the 2014 period. Spring 2014 had moderate temperatures allowing good bud break and blooming, been both very homogeneous. Summer was more temperate than usual, with some heat waves that lasted for 5 consecutive days in January. This season Colchagua registered the higher growing degree days’ sum of the last three periods, due mainly to the high temperatures registered towards the end of summer, made of March the warmest of the last decades. However, grapes showed excellent quality when picked with a good aromatic expression and good tannic structure.
Our Petit Clos was hand harvested in small cases of 12 kilos.
The grapes are then hand de-stemmed in our Clos Apalta Winery so we maintain complete control of the quality.
We fill our fermentation French oak vats by gravity. We use native yeast to ferment the grape juice into wine, with temperature control max. 30° C. Macerations lasted for a maximum of 6 weeks and during that period we did gentle manual punch downs to extract enough compounds from skins to get the desired structure and concentration. We rack the young new wine straight into 100% new French oak barrels by gravity. Natural malolactic occurred in the barrels, where the wine stayed for 6 months. After that, we did the selection of the lots for the wine and the first racking. The wine was then aged for another 17 months in 22% in New French Oak barrels, 49% one-year-old used French oak barrels and 29% in Oak vats of 75hl. We estate bottled the wine by gravity without any treatment or filtration.