While on a stopover in Dubai I spent some time tasting through the wines available in the Emirates Business Class lounge there. The first wine I alighted on was this a top-quality Chilean wine, the 2015 vintage of Sena. A very impressive wine to find in an airport lounge and typical of Emirates ambition to have the best wine selection of any airline.
Seña is a single-estate in Chiles’s Aconcagua Valley, founded in 1995 by Robert Mondavi and Eduardo Chadwick of Errazuriz. The estate produces just one wine – it was one of Chile’s first icon wines and has been benchmarked against the leading wines of Bordeaux and well-known Super Tuscans, often winning top spots in blind tastings.
The wine is typically a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon (normally 55 to 60%) with Carmenere, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. Its hillside vineyards cover 42 hectares and spread across a range of soil types. The estate’s mesoclimate is slightly cooler than that of the Aconcagua valley floor, with harvest a fortnight later than in valley floor sites. Ravines between the plots are left to providee habitats for flora and fauna. Viticulture here has been certified as biodynamic since 2005.
Fruit is hand picked at delivered to the winery in shallow 12kg boxes to prevent damage during transport. At the winery the bunches are sorted by hand. sorted. Grapes are mostly fermented in temperature-controlled stainless steel tanks, but more recently a small proportion has been vinified in new French oak barrels. Maceration times vary between 6 and 33 days, according to the variety and the development of the individual lot. I should have said in the video that the wine undergoes malolactic conversion in new French oak barrels before ageing in barrel for 22 months.
To find out more about this wine, its price and where to purchase it follow this link to the Wine-Searcher website: https://www.wine-searcher.com/find/sena+aconcagua+valley+chile/2015?referring_site=DCA
▶️ CHAPTERS:
0:00 Sena 2015 wine label
0:20 Background and history of Sena
0:33 Spill incident!
0:43 Joint venture between Errazuriz and Robert Mondavi established in 1995 to make a world-class Chilean wine.
0:54 Makes a name for itself in the 2004 Judgement of Berlin tasting
1:51 Size and location of the estate
2:02 Altitude of the vineyards
2:12 Soil types
2:27 Aspect and slope
2:33 Biodynamic viticulture
2:58 Climate
3:25 2015 vintage for Aconcagua
4:14 Relative picking dates
4:24 WINEMAKING – Hand picked into shallow crates
4:34 sorted by hand on sorting tables
4:48 Fermentation in stainless steel tanks at between 24 – 31 degrees C
5:00 Length of maceration varies between varieties
5:18 Blend
5:38 Oak ageing for 22 months
6:06 TASTING – Appearance
6:39 Aroma
7:07 Palate
6:41 Conclusions
8:26 Score
9:07 A joy to find a wine of this quality while travelling
9:17 Ability to age
9:55 Thanks, closing remarks and sign-off
▶️Follow this link to watch my tasting of Concha y Toro Don Melchor 2022: https://youtu.be/17H9iVl_fdQ
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