Climens 2013

The 2013 Climens has a very fragrant bouquet with bunches of white flowers, buttercup, citrus fruits, honey and just a faint hint of oyster shell, all very well defined. There is a cold stone influence here that tempers its exuberance. The palate is very well balanced, spicy in the mouth, beautifully balanced with ginger and nutmeg infusing the honeyed fruit. This is a feisty Barsac, animated and energetic, a little "untamed" in its youth and very long. It is a great Climens that is going to age for many years. Tasted April 2016.

The 2013 Climens features a pale lemon-yellow color and expressive notes of candied citrus peel, honey-drizzled white peaches and brioche with wafts of marzipan and ginger. It has lovely harmony in the mouth, with a wonderful citrus peel intensity defined by great freshness, finishing with bags of depth and energy. Drink Date 2022 - 2048

Cropped at ten hectoliters per hectare, this represents the first certified organic Chateau Climens. As usual, I have to conjecture how the final blend will manifest itself, a task becoming easier now that I have tasted through individual lots for several years. Clearly, the first tries contain zesty citrus fruit with crisp acidity and strong botrytis character, the second tries lending the structure and the Barsac/Climens character. I noticed a "marine" influence on the final tries picked on October 21 and 23, although here there is a slight attenuation. Putting all this together, I foresee an assured, perhaps slightly lighter but tensile Climens, with the more heavily botrytized fruit delivered toward the end. Quality is certainly on par with a very good vintage, the most impressive lots destined to form major components of the final blend. This ought to be a classic Climens.

"We started the harvest on the 27th of September, which was not as late as we thought," Berenice Lurton told me. "The maturity was quite late due to the bad spring - or not even any spring at all - with poor flowering. During the summer, it could not catch up. The ripeness was quite late, but botrytis arrived quickly and we were prepared. We were incredibly lucky, because we finished the first picking under good conditions on the 3rd of October at 7.00pm, the night when a lot of rain fell at Climens. We stopped for eight days and then made a quick picking in a few plots, but there was not much to pick. The weather became fresh and humid, so botrytis was everywhere, but the problem was that it was not concentrated, so on Friday, the 18th of October, we inspected the vineyard and decided we could not pick. We were quite anxious, because rain was predicted. But exactly like 2012, we had a perfect weekend with a lot of wind on Saturday and a perfect Sunday that was enough to concentrate the berries on the first plots. We finished in a few days on Thursday at midday and then it started raining again in the afternoon. So the windows for us were amazingly small. There were sixteen lots in the beginning, and the first micro-blends were good so there are now eight lots. When we were blending, we could not really see what was from the beginning and the end of the harvest."