The Top 100: Wine of the Year
CASA LAPOSTOLLE
Clos Apalta Colchagua Valley 2005
96 / $75 5,987 cases made
When Alexandra Marnier-Lapostolle toured the vineyards of Chile in the early 1990s, she was particularly intrigued by the potential of Apalta, a small crescent-shaped subvalley in the center of the Colchagua Valley.
Seeing old vines and a unique, dry-farmed terroir, she gambled. Rather than stay with the family business (the Grand Marnier empire), she decided to embark on her own project; after purchasing vineyards in Apalta in 1994, she founded Casa Lapostolle.
Soon after, Marnier-Lapostolle oversaw renovation of an existing winery facility and vineyards before beginning vineyard plantings of her own in 1997. The upgrades paid off, and the winery's Cuvée Alexandre bottlings of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay became some of Chile's most consistent values.
From there, Marnier-Lapostolle set her sights on producing a premium cuvée sourced from her best vines. In the 1997 vintage, with the help of her then-winemaker Michel Friou and consulting enologist Michel Rolland, she debuted her Clos Apalta bottling, made from a blend of Carmenère, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon sourced from the estate's oldest vines, up to 80 years old.
The 1997 Clos Apalta was outstanding, rating 92 points on Wine Spectator's 100-point scale at the time of release. But Marnier-Lapostolle wasn't satisfied.
Starting with the 2000 vintage, she began to ferment smaller and smaller vineyard lots in open-top wooden vats. With the 2002 vintage, she began having a team of harvesters hand-destem individual berries-a painstaking technique taking 80 workers a full day to handle one-fifth the grapes that a mechanical destemmer can process in an hour.
In 2005, Marnier-Lapostolle hired winemaker Jacques Begarie to take over for Friou, and followed that by hiring Chilean geological specialist Pedro Parra to help her and her team precisely map and understand the different qualities of her vineyard parcels. Finally, construction on a new, six-story, gravity-flow winery designed solely for the production of the Clos Apalta cuvée was completed in time for the 2005 harvest.
The timing was fortuitous, as Chile's 2005 vintage, highlighted by a long, warm and dry growing season that helped produced rich, dense reds, was easily the best vintage for the country's modern wine industry. With the harvest producing small, concentrated berries, and pickers working well into April, Marnier-Lapostolle was able to add a small amount of Petit Verdot to the blend for the first time. This late-ripening variety adds aroma and color, helping to complement the wine's fleshy Carmenère component.
A blend of 42 percent Carmenère, 28 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 26 percent Merlot and 4 percent Petit Verdot, the 2005 Clos Apalta offers gorgeous aromas of warm ganache and mocha, followed by a rich and velvety palate loaded with currant, fig paste, black licorice, cassis bush and bramble notes. The long, juicy finish has great grip and density, with echoes of graphite, dark fruit and mineral that should reward cellaring over the next decade. The wine's price has remained relatively modest through the years, considering the investment behind it, and particularly so in comparsion to prices for benchmark wines from regions such as Bordeaux, Napa Valley and Tuscany.
Casa Lapostolle's Clos Apalta, along with a handful of other Chilean wines, such as Viña Montes Alpha M, Concha y Toro Don Melchor and Viña Almaviva, helped to establish Chile as one of the world's top red-wine growing regions. For Marnier-Lapostolle and Clos Apalta, it was a decade-plus-long process of trial and error, continual improvement and exacting attention to detail. The 2005 is a wine that showcases an exceptional terroir and a country's unique variety (Carmenère), thanks to the efforts of a passionate and determined winery owner in an outstanding vintage. For this, the Casa Lapostolle Clos Apalta Colchagua Valley 2005 is our Wine of the Year for 2008.
