Masseto 2020 is a wine that has embraced all the key traits of the vintage. It displays excellent concentration both in terms of colour and bouquet. They remain persistent and vivid in the glass without subsiding over time. The potency of this wine returns on the palate with beautiful length and balsamic flavours. The integrity of the tannin reveals the ageing potential typical of Masseto.
Review:
Intense and full on the nose, fragrant with ripe black fruit, floral aspects and soft spicing. Round and full on the palate, it's rich and muscular yet tight and neatly coiled with a liquorice, graphite, pepper, cinnamon and clove tang that gives this immediate but enjoyable spice. Feels well worked, juicy with high acidity that lifts the palate and gives freshness and brightness alongside really quite mouthwatering strawberry and raspberry fruit with such captivating dried floral and bitter orange rind aspects. Tannins are super fine and so well integrated yet this maintains a grip and hold from the very beginning through to a long and sustained finish. Nuanced and complex, still packing a punch in terms of power, but this feels sophisticated, suave, purposeful and controlled. Not elegant, this is more of a caged animal with it's full potential yet to be unveiled, but it is classy. A truly delicious wine with so much purity and sense of place. Malolactic fermentation in 100% new barroques, with each batch kept separate for the first 12 months of ageing before being blended and returned to barriques for another year, totaling 24 months. The wine was then aged for a further 12 months in bottle before being released.
-Decanter 100 Points
For many wine lovers or consumers, wine tasting is the preserve of professionals or real connoisseurs. People still have this image of it being a complex, technical, precise and highly-formalised process. In fact, wine tasting isn’t and shouldn’t be just that. No, it should be straightforward, convivial, interesting and fun. Tasting a wine should provoke curiosity, excitement, pleasure and dreams…
When you taste a Château du Retout wine, you use all five of your senses: the sense of touch when you pick up the bottle to gauge its temperature, the sense of hearing which allows you to enjoy the sound of he popping of the cork and the wine being poured into the glass, and then, of course, you use your senses of sight, smell and taste when you drink the wine:
The Médoc grape varieties and soils give us wines with superb, dense, dark hues, ranging from deep garnet to ruby-crimson, taking on brick red shades with orange tints with age.
Very intense and expressive aromas with powerful notes of black fruit such as blackcurrants and blackberries. In older wines, the nose develops a spicy bouquet of liquorice, leather and marshmallow mingled with the vanilla scents created by well-integrated oak.
Harmonious, elegant and velvety, with smooth, round tannins, that can be appreciated from the wine's entry to the palate through to the finish. These are delightfully full-bodied wines with great aromatic persistence.
Review:
"Shows the ripeness of the vintage, with dark currant and blackberry framed by singed cedar and vanilla. Ends with a tug of warm earth, a light twang of iron and a steady grip. Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Petit Verdot. Drink now through 2034."
- Wine Spectator (TOP 100 wines of 2024), 92 pts and #45 on Top100