The 2016 Château Camensac is an impressive wine, showing vibrant freshness and complexity. It combines dark fruits with floral notes and a touch of eucalyptus, offering a layered, fleshy mouthfeel with lively acidity. This wine will continue to develop and improve in the coming years, but is already a great representation of the estate's evolving style. Best to drink from 2024 onwards, with a drinking window extending into 2040 for those who prefer more maturity.

Jamessuckling.com | JS 93
Published: Feb 3, 2019

A prototypical Médoc wine with very good depth and beautiful harmony. I love the long, moderately dry and savory finish that pulls your hand instinctively back to the glass. A blend of 50 per cent cabernet sauvignon and 50 per cent merlot. Drink or hold.

The Wine Advocate | RP 91+
Published: Oct 31, 2022
Drink: 2022-2042

The 2016 Camensac has turned out brilliantly, revealing aromas of dark berries, violets, rose petals, baking chocolate and cherries. Medium to full-bodied, ample and fleshy, it's a layered, impressively concentrated wine with lively acids and a perfumed finish. I'm sure Camensac will hit higher highs in the future, but for now, this is a benchmark vintage for the estate.

Occupying some 50 hectares on the plateau in Saint-Laurent-Médoc, not far from Château Lagrange over the border in Saint-Julien, Château Camensac is another of the Médoc's improving estates. Today, under the management of Céline Villars-Foubet and Jean-Pierre Foubet, something of a renaissance is underway, with some 35 hectares of newly planted Cabernet Sauvignon replacing improperly situated Merlot on the two large gravel domes that represent the heart of the property. Since the estate's existing vine genetics were not deemed good enough, massale selections from elsewhere and high-quality clones have been chosen for these new plantings. In the winery, after an initial dalliance with a rather oaky, extracted style, Eric Boissenot has replaced the previous consultant enologist, and the approach now favors elegance and classicism. As the new Cabernet Sauvignon plantings start contributing to the blend, Camensac seems to improve every year, almost irrespective of vintage conditions, and it's clearly a property to watch, producing perfumed, supple wines of considerable appeal.

Decanter | D 91
Published: Oct 8, 2018
Drink: 2024-2040

This is a vintage where the freshness levels run high, and here a rich array of dark tight fruits is joined by high acidity with menthol and eucalyptus notes. It's good quality, but needs to settle into its stride, and fatten up a little further in bottle. There has been pyrazine in the past at Camensac, and they are doing a lot of work with the vines to reduce that - this 2016 has clearly shifted from green pepper to eucalyptus, which gives good Médoc typicity while retaining fruit character. A successful wine.

Closure: Cork
Grapes: 50% Cabernet Sauvignon 50% Merlot

Chateaucamensac.com

Great care is taken in a constant search for excellence and the best expression of the Terroir. Ever more rigorous plot selection and vinification adapted to the grapes result in a fresh, seductive wine, in the same style as the label: elegant, modern, refined and with a touch of originality that breaks with the traditional image of Bordeaux’s Grands Vins.

Grape varieties
Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in varying proportions depending on the vintage.

Terroir
The style of Camensac’s wines is explained by the geographical location and the micro-climate, with mild winters and hot summers but which is also oceanic, favouring healthy growth and well- ripened grapes, combined with a deep gravel terroir, brought by the river (Villafranchian gravel as in Pessac-Léognan and Gunzian gravel as in the St Julien appellation).

Organoleptic profile
The wine is bright and clear with a dark colour.
There are recurrent aromas of black pepper and rose. The structure is fine with plenty of substance on the mid-palate.
This is a balanced, powerful wine.
The finish is very long, recalling the red fruit of the initial nose with well-integrated oak.