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Tasting Notes
Fresh fruit is layered with spice and richer, deeper tones of the 2022 Grand Village. It’s dense and concentrated from the warm growing season, but with an impressive vibrancy and tension from firm but ripe tannins. A really impressive result this year. Blend: 80% Merlot, 20% Cabernet Franc
Critic Scores
Average Score
Yohan Castaing, Wine Advocate
Antonio Galloni, Vinous
More reviews and scores
The 2022 Grand Village (Lafleur)comes from more clay and limestone soils and is 80% Merlot (half of the Merlot is a massale selection from Lafleur) and 10% Bouschet. This beauty is medium to full-bodied and has incredible purity in its ripe red and blue fruits as well as notes of graphite, chocolate, violets, and damp earth. It reminds me of a great Pomerol and brings plenty of richness and depth while staying balanced and finesse-driven.
Baptiste Guinaudeau and his team have produced a beautifully pure, perfumed 2022 Grand Village that bursts with aromas of licorice, graphite, blackberries, pencil shaving, iris and fresh mint. Medium to full-bodied, seamless and fleshy, this outstanding wine is perfectly balanced on the palate with velvety tannins and a bright, saline finish. This is one of the very best Grand Villages produced to date, and it benefits from the sort of careful winemaking normally reserved for cru classé wines. It’s a blend of 80% Merlot and 20% Cabernet Franc, although for the latter grape the Guinaudeau family prefers the local name of Bouchet.
The 2022 Grand Village is a powerful, brooding wine. Swaths of tannin wrap around a core of black fruit, gravel, incense, licorice and chocolate in a potent Grand Village that overdelivers. The 2022 is a wine of notable substance and breadth. I wouldn’t dream of opening a bottle for at least a few years. The 2022 is the most intense young Grand Village I have ever tasted. There is serious potential here.
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About the producer
The Société Civile du Ch. Lafleur is the collective name for the Guinaudeau family’s wines and estates. These are some of the Right Bank’s most famous wines, including Ch. Lafleur and Les Pensées in Pomerol, along with Les Perrières, Les Champs Libres and Ch. Grand Village in Fronsac.