We drank the Château Arnauton 2011 with Bavette steak and the wine is well suited to red meats including beef and lamb. The wine was typical of the region with a very fruity and complex aroma. I could taste vanilla and the typical tobacco box flavour of a Bordeaux red. It was of full body and was well balanced for acidity, tannin and sweetness and of course the wine was dry. The 2011 vintage is now ready for drinking but will keep longer. It is one step up from everyday drinking wine and deserves to be served with a good meal.You can buy this wine for around £10 a bottle in the UK and it is exceptional value for money. If you go to France you will find it a lot cheaper. I recommend it highly.
Château Chasse-Spleen is one of my favourites; it is produced in Moulis-en-Médoc. The wine really is up at another level from the Fronsac. If you want to get an appreciation of what a top Bordeaux wine tastes like without paying an enormous price then try some Château Chasse-Spleen 2010. The wine has all the regional taste of a Bordeaux and more, as it has its own distinctive flavour which marks it out as a special wine in my point of view. It stands out from the Fronsac in being more complex and concentrated with a much longer length on the palate.
The Chasse -Spleen vineyard is situated in the Haut Médoc on the left bank of the Gironde. The soil here is a mixture of limestone marls and clays and gravel. And, of course the soil, weather and climate are perfect for growing the Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes which are used to produce this best of wines.
We drank our wine with friends over lunch and we ate lamb. One of our friends is a wine lover who knows his stuff and another of our friends knows nothing about wine but I can always trust him to sniff out something special and he was not disappointed. Both of my friends agreed that this is top wine. My wife agreed too.
The Château Chasse-Spleen 2010 was ready for drinking but it will keep a lot longer. 2010 was a good vintage so it augurs well for the keeping quality of the wine.
My wife was impressed with my selection of wine and I was impressed with her French style preparation and cooking of the lamb. Two of the other ladies present chose to drink white wine so I served them a 2012 Hugel Gewurztraminer from Alsace so they were not left out in the quality stakes.
A bottle of Château Chasse-Spleen 2010 will set you back around £30 in the UK so it is a lot more expensive than the Fronsac Château Arnauton 2011. The Fronsac manages to hold its own however, even if it cannot reach the heights of the Chasse-Spleen.
I don't usually buy wine that costs more than about £18 a bottle and at that only rarely but sometimes it is worth paying a good bit more to treat yourself and your friends for a special occasion which was a belated birthday celebration for me. For this reason the Chasse-Spleen was worth every penny and especially when it can also give a top Bordeaux costing ten times as much a good run for its money. I highly recommend this wine for a special occasion.
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