Tertre Roteboeuf OWC-6 St Emilion AC – 2020

“The 2020 Le Tertre Roteboeuf will delight admirers of Mitjaville’s singular style. Unfurling in the glass with aromas of rich dark berries and plums mingled with black truffles, exotic spices, espresso roast, cedar, vine smoke and toasty new oak, it’s full-bodied, layered and velvety, with an ample core of ripe, heady fruit framed by sweet, powdery tannins, concluding with a long, sapid finish.” 96+pts The Wine Advocate

“François Mitjavile, Saint-Émilion’s philosophically minded gentleman farmer, continues to produce some of Bordeaux’s most singular and characterful wines from this amphitheater-shaped 5.6-hectare vineyard on the south-facing clay-limestone slopes of Saint-Laurent-de-Combes. Pruned in cordon and trained almost impossibly low to the ground, Mitjaville’s Merlot and Cabernet Franc fruit is harvested as late as possible, in pursuit of what he describes as the “sumptuous degradation” of its tannins. Vinification is in some respects rather old-fashioned, with rather warm fermentations and élevage in new barrels (from Tonnellerie Radoux) in a cellar that fluctuates in temperature following the seasons without temperature control. His conviction is that, as he puts it, “the most original wines are paradoxically also the most traditional.” Above all, Mitjavile has a horror of primary, monolithic wines, instead admiring aromatic complexity and textural sensuality; Tertre Roteboeuf exemplifies those priorities with its rich aromas uniting ultra-ripe but invariably surprisingly vibrant fruit tones with a rich patina of secondary and tertiary nuances. Their aging trajectory can be just as singular as their style: Sometimes vintages that seem tired take on, a decade later, a new lease of life, and while Tertre Roteboeuf often seems to be rather mature at a young age, it tends to seem unusually youthful when it’s old.” Wine Advocate