Wine of the week: high praise for this graceful, ethereal semillon

(Image credit: 2019 Château Climens Asphodèle wine)

published 9 April 2021

2019 Château Climens, Asphodèle, Grand Vin Blanc Sec, Bordeaux, France

£26.50, bbr.com

Climens’s owner Bérénice Lurton makes some of the greatest sweet wines in the world, but her illustrious property had never made dry whites until recently. In 2018 she launched a dry white wine named Asphodèle, after the delicate, wild lilies which grow in the chalky soils on the estate. Biodynamically certified since 2014, this 100% semillon wine is unlike anything I have tasted and the 2019 vintage is a gem.

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Semillon as a monovarietal dry wine is, arguably, at its finest in select cuvées from the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Australia. Wineries such as Tyrrell’s, Mount Pleasant and Brokenwood make celestial creations with naturally low alcohol and little oak intervention. They start life water white and then age like clockwork for two or more decades. Most dry white Bordeaux employ the services of sauvignon blanc alongside semillon in the blend and oak during maturation – when I heard that Bérénice’s wine was a pure semillon with no oak used whatsoever, I was extremely excited. This is one of the most graceful, ethereal and delicious French semillons I have tasted. It is silky-smooth, cucumber-tinged and extraordinarily pretty on both the nose and palate. It might seem an odd observation, but this wine does not taste like a Bordeaux interpretation of a Loire style of white wine, but a French version of an elite Hunter semillon. This is the highest praise I can offer.

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Matthew Jukes has worked in the UK wine business for well over three decades and during this time has written 14 wine books.

Matthew regularly lectures, judges, speaks at wine conferences and runs masterclass tastings for both corporate and private clients all over the world. Matthew is also the creator of his ground-breaking initiative, the One Day Wine School, an indulgent day of tasting and learning first performed in 2006.

He has been the MoneyWeek wine correspondent since 2006 and has written a weekly column for the Daily Mail’s Weekend Magazine since 1999. His four highly-acclaimed, annual wine reports – the Burgundy En Primeur Report, the Bordeaux En Primeur Report, the Piemonte Report and the 100 Best Australian Wines – are published on his website, www.matthewjukes.com.

Matthew is one of the world’s leading experts on Australian wine and, with Brisbane-based wine writer Tyson Stelzer, runs an annual competition in Australia to find ‘The Great Australian Red’. He was made Honorary Australian of the Year in the UK at the 2012 Australia Day Foundation Gala dinner.

Matthew is a winner of the International Wine and Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year Trophy. His thoughts, recommendations and tastings notes are followed very closely by the wine world at large.