Le Cent Des Jours - Les Calades 2020
Price: $23.99
| Producer | Le Cent Des Jours |
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| Country | France |
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| Region | Cahors |
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| Varietal | Malbec |
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| Vintage | 2020 |
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| Sku | 32944 |
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This wine is a game-changer for Malbec enthusiasts, easily one of my top picks in a while. While the deep color might catch you off guard, that first sip is a revelation. Personally, it made me smile, reinforcing my love and appreciation for the industry I'm in. Having a wine like this is special because I understand the effort behind winemaking, taking my appreciation to another level. With its dark, juicy profile reminiscent of blended blueberries and dark fruits, coupled with a solid medium to full body structure, each sip gets beter and better. You'll savor every moment and probably wish you grabbed two bottles. - Fonz
Le Cent Des Jours Description
A blend of Malbec from their three different soil types (see The Plot section) picked at different times within a 10 to 12-day span, it is for this that Laurent’s mid-range Cahors, Les Calades, is the most accessible and widely appealing. He describes it as the flagship of their range, “a pure Malbec with power and freshness that represents the king grape variety of our appellation on limestone, and the new generation of Cahors: more fluid, rich and balanced with a distinct and very present mineral and marine finish.”
Each plot has an average age of around 40 years (2023) and naturally ferments in separate concrete vats with 10% of whole bunches between three weeks to a month. Because Malbec already provides a lot of substance from its very thick skin, he does a single short pump-over every two days to preserve the hygiene of the cap of about 300 liters in total of the 50hl vat. After fermentation, the grapes are pressed and mixed with the free-run wine and aged for 11-13 months equally between Italian terracotta amphora, old 30hl French oak vats and six-year-old 225l French oak barrels. They’re lightly filtered at bottling without any added sulfites.
Again, we defer to Tyler Kavanaugh for a thorough description of the 2020 Les Calades tasted around Thanksgiving: “A deep and focused black-red fruit medley and purple flowers with a refreshing graphite-cool mouthfeel. It’s soft and broad in the mouth and a little sanguine in a steely, iodine-forward sense. The tannins are pleasantly chewy with sweeter black and red berries (though not ripe/overripe) and loads of freshness. It feels firm in the middle on weight, structure and acidity with a nicely detailed direction to the fruit that keeps you coming back to the tart blackberry and boysenberry, bramble, florist fridge fresh dark flowers and leaves and stems in the cold. It’s solid on the second day with the floral aromatics lifting well above the fruit with the tannins lightly tightening up. It didn’t last beyond the second day due to its deliciousness factor, which kept me pulling it from my ‘secret’ Thanksgiving bag.”
