The 2021 Valandraud offers up aromas of minty berries framed by a generous application of creamy new oak. Medium to full-bodied, with a creamy attack that segues into a mid-palate built around chalky barrel tannins, it concludes with a vanillin-inflected and discreetly herbal finish. This showed more harmoniously en primeur than in bottle.

Opening in the glass with inviting aromas of dark berries, baking chocolate, exotic spices and vanilla pod, the 2021 Valandraud is a medium to full-bodied, ample and fleshy wine that's seamless and layered, exhibiting impressive concentration, beautifully ripe tannins and a long, succulent finish. Bursting with fruit, this is an especially elegant Valandraud, with below-average alcohol at 13.5%, but it doesn't lack for anything. Tasted four times, twice at the ch?teau. Jean-Luc Thunevin once worked for a bank owned by the Mouiex family, and, without knowing all that much about wine, requested some bottles of the 1955 P?trus, his wife's birth year. As a good employee, his request was gratified, and his passion for wine began; the rest is history. But today, this emblematic vin de garage has become a vin de terroir, defined by holdings on the cool, shallow clay-over-limestone soils of Saint-?tienne-de-Lisse; and the garage has become a state-of-the-art winery, with all the precision and temperature control that comes with it. The Valandraud style is undeniably fleshy and dramatic, even hedonistic, and the estate's 2021 (all 24,000 bottles of it) exemplify that style in an unusually elegant, middleweight register.