Chateau Clinet 2014

When Ronan Laborde inherited the cellar in 2004, his first act was to reduce new oak from 100% to 60% — a deliberate decompression that let the iron-laced terroir speak rather than the barrel. The 2014 vintage marks a second inflection point: the installation of 17 plot-specific temperature-controlled vats (25–45 hl) plus a single concrete vat, making parcel-by-parcel fermentation a structural reality rather than an aspiration.

Clinet sits at the highest point of the Pomerol plateau — 35 metres — on a mosaic of Günz gravel over deep clay with crasse de fer subsoil. The iron-rich hardpan restricts root descent, concentrating stress into the vine and imprinting a graphite-mineral precision that the surrounding clay-dominant parcels of Pétrus and L'Évangile do not share.

Maceration runs 28–30 days, extracting the full structural vocabulary of the vintage. Malolactic fermentation completes in French oak barrel, integrating lactic texture directly into the wood matrix. The final blend — approximately 80–88% old-vine Merlot (including fruit from the 1934-planted La Grand Vigne parcel) and 12–20% Cabernet Sauvignon — is bottled neither fined nor filtered, preserving the mineral imprint intact.

That Cabernet Sauvignon presence is Clinet's defining transgression on the Right Bank: a deliberate retention of pre-1956-frost plantings that no Pomerol peer replicates at meaningful scale, delivering a graphite-and-tobacco backbone that lengthens the aging arc well beyond the plateau norm. The 2014 growing season delivered cool, even ripening — expect taut red and dark fruit framed by firm, fine-grained tannins, with the iron-mineral thread of crasse de fer running through the finish; drink 2025–2045.