Cuvee Rouge Chateau Routas

Château Routas red is a powerful and delicious wine. The nose reveals notes of black fruits, chocolate and spices. The complex palate discloses notes of red fruits and roasting with a very fine woodiness. The wine has a beautiful structure with melted and silky tannins and a nice balance with freshness. The finish is long with notes of small red fruits

Our red comes from a rigorous plot selection of old vines planted on hillsides. The harvest is carried out by hand in order to best select the bunches. The grapes are destemmed, crushed then vatted for 3 weeks. The Syrah, Grenache and Cabernet Sauvignon are fermented separately to reveal the diversity of the estate’s terroirs. During fermentation, long pumping over allows aromas, tannins and colour to be extracted. After racking and devatting, the Syrah is put into 2-year-old barrels and aged on fine lees for 12 months with stirring (bâtonnage) to gain roundness. The Grenache and Cabernet are blended and aged in microporous ovoid tank in order to refine the tannins. The ovoid tank has the advantage of significant contact with the lees to reap the full benefit.

The 43-hectare vineyard, cultivated on hillsides and surrounded by 290 hectares of forest, is made up of Cinsault, Grenache, Syrah and old vines of Cabernet Sauvignon for the black grapes
and Viognier and Chardonnay for the white grapes. The management of the vineyard, without the use of herbicides or pesticides, is intended to respect the fauna and flora and the exceptional
natural resource that our estate constitutes. In an effort to always better preserve this resource, the vineyard is being converted to High Environmental Value agriculture.
The vineyard manager does not use irrigation to preserve water on the estate to promote the root establishment of the vines as well as the concentration of the grapes. Similarly, amendments and nutrition are limited to organic inputs of animal and plant origin. Phytosanitary control is limited to what is strictly necessary and correlated to the pressure of diseases on the vineyard, only as a preventive measure.