2015 Saumur Champigny Clos de L'Echelier

With fascinating purity and tightly woven mineral freshness, Thierry Germain's biodynamic, cherry-colored 2015 Saumur Champigny Clos de l'Échelier offers ripe, intense yet pure, fresh and aromatic cherry fruit along with floral, graphite and toasty oak aromas (fermented in a wooden Stockinger cuve). Sourced from a clos with a 50-centimeter layer of sandy loam on calcareous rocks, this is a pure, fresh and elegant, tightly structured and grippy Cabernet from vines almost 35 years old. Still very young, lean and nervous but tensioned, fresh and promising. I'd keep it in my cellar for at least another three years.