BORDEAUX’S RESURRECTION Led by a handful of avant-garde winemakers, the artisanal viticulture movement is making waves in perhaps the greatest of all French wine regions. Jeffrey T Iverson reports Illustrations by Valero Doval
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nsconced in 2,000 years of history and grandeur, Bordeaux is the largest fine wine district on Earth. And yet it is also a region in crisis. Collectors have begun shunning Médoc first-growths and their inflated futures prices, while too many producers have tarnished Bordeaux’s reputation using sometimes dubious oenological manipulations to create standardised, critic-pleasing profiles. “There’s been a revaluation of Bordeaux across the board,” David Elswood, Christie’s international director of wine, recently told Bloomberg. “I’ve never seen such a ripple effect.” The Bordeaux wine council (CIVB), which promotes the region worldwide, felt that ripple reach its backyard this spring. “CIVB realised that many restaurants in Paris were boycotting the wine of Bordeaux,” says Guillaume Dupré of the trendsetting Paris wine bar Coinstot Vino (coinstotvino.com). Thus, this March, CIVB launched a tasting series with Dupré and five other sommeliers from France’s culinary new wave to (re)introduce Parisians to a little-known side of Bordeaux – innovative winemakers from small estates who are reviving veritable artisan winemaking. “There’s another generation in their thirties and forties which is starting a revolution in Bordeaux,” enthuses Dupré. Banning pesticides in the vineyard and laboratory yeasts in the cellar, they are creating authentic wines with depth, balance and vibrant personalities – much needed balms to Bordeaux’s bruised image. For fifth-generation winemaker Olivier Techer, 34, of Château Gombaude-Guillot (chateau-gombaudeguillot.com), which is centered on four hectares of vines on the Pomerol plateau, Bordeaux’s crisis is about identity. Ever since the uncommonly balmy 1982 “California vintage”, “the trend has been to push ripeness to the extreme”, he says. This new style of jammy Bordeaux shows well early in tastings but often lacks what made Bordeaux legendary – longevity. “A Bordeaux at 15º alcohol with a lack of acidity will nosedive with time,” says Techer. “But a wine that’s a little austere [when] young will improve
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character”. Naturally, much of Godelu’s gastronomyfriendly, malbec-dominant 6,000-bottle production – boasting healthy acidity, concentration and exquisite floral and fruit notes – lands on the tables of Michelinstarred chefs, from France’s Eric Guerin to Gordon Ramsay in London.
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over decades: the tannins soften, complex aromas emerge.” Techer recently opened a dusty bottle of Gombaude-Guillot to prove his point: smooth as silk, intensely fragrant and exuberantly youthful, it was vinified by Techer’s mother, Claire Laval, in 1985. Laval made Gombaude-Guillot Pomerol’s first organic winery in 1999, while renouncing all oenological additives besides grapes at optimum maturity and a pinch of sulphites. The trained agronomist has spent her life studying what makes Bordeaux one of the world’s greatest wine terroirs. “The Bordelais dream of having a Mediterranean climate,” she sighs. “They want over-the-top concentration, whereas our real potential in Bordeaux are wines with balance, freshness, complexity – characteristics we owe to our cooler, oceanic climate.” With Techer vinifying today, those characteristics continue to define GombaudeGuillot’s purebred pomerols.
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lsace-born Valérie Godelu can’t boast deep viticultural roots: she was an epicurean with a career in finance and a winemaking degree by correspondence when she left Paris with her husband Denis and three daughters to launch Les Trois Petiotes (lestroispetiotes.over-blog.com) in 2008 in Côtes de Bourg on Bordeaux’s right bank. In addition to merlot and cabernet, the 3ha vineyard includes old-growth malbec vines, once the region’s principal grape but widely abandoned for its fragile skins unsuited to mechanised viticulture. Godelu’s grapes, though, receive a gentle touch from vine to cellar. Eschewing thermovinification techniques – where grapes are nearly boiled to rapidly draw out flavours and pigments – she employs long, four-to-five-week fermentations on native yeasts at low temperatures to retain delicate aromas. “I wasn’t interested in making a modern Bordeaux wine, which I feel are often heavy and lack freshness,” she says. Her vision is for “wines of character for a cuisine of
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uch like Godelu, Michel Favard in SaintEmilion always believed his terroir harboured untapped potential. In the 1980s, he stopped the family practice of selling their grapes to turn his 2ha Château Meylet (chateau-meylet. com) into an avant-garde winery. Forgoing chemical fungicides in Bordeaux’s climate was considered suicidal, but convinced healthy vines could defend themselves against disease, Favard successfully converted to biodynamic viticulture in 1987. To reduce harsh tannins and preserve his grapes’ extraordinary fruit flavours, he imported Burgundystyle foot-stomping, or pigeage, in the 1990s and stopped filtering or fining his wine. Today, he adds little-to-no sulphites at bottling, preferring a mix of nitrogen and CO2 gases to prevent oxidation. “For me, the whole interest in being a vigneron is to be constantly evolving, experimenting and perfecting,” he says. “To always be seeking new ways to improve the quality of my wine.” Oenophiles call Château Meylet, with its exquisite power and elegance, one of the last classic Saint-Emilion wines, and they can rest assured it will long be so: last year Favard passed the winemaking torch to his son, David.
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hile less-prestigious than the others, Côtes de Blaye has its trailblazers too, including a vigneron of singular intellect and innovation – Dominique Léandre-Chevalier of Domaine LéandreChevalier (www.lhommecheval.com). For more than two decades the former architect has pursued the quintessence of wine like a mathematician chasing a theorem. He downsized his 1895 family property from 12 hectares in the 1990s to its current three, abandoned chemicals in the vineyard and cellar, planted a parcel in provignage – ungrafted vines growing in an ever-widening circle – and traded tractor for horse. (Léandre-Chevalier’s etymology is l’homme-cheval, or horse-man.) He has increased vine density up to 33,333 vines per hectare – well above Bordeaux’s minimum of 2,000 – to naturally reduce yields and concentrate grape flavour. He has imagined myriad cuvées, from his Blanc de Noir (an unprecedented white wine made from red cabernet sauvignon) and his deliciously distinctive 11111 and 33333 bottlings of merlot planted at different densities, to his tar-black, rich-yet-refined, €3,000+, ultra-confidential Tricolore cuvée: 144 bottles of 100% ungrafted, pre-phylloxera Petit Verdot – a force of nature, like its creator.
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ess the intellectual, Vincent Quirac manages his 1.5ha micro-estate Clos 19 bis (clos19bis. fr) with razor-sharp intuition. With a couple of viticulture courses under his belt and some borrowed winemaking equipment, the former desert travel guide started a second career in 2008 making a few thousand bottles of uncommonly quaffable red wine, redolent of spice and ripe red fruit, in Bordeaux’s Graves appellation. The vineyard he acquired came with an unwanted 0.5ha parcel in the nearby sweet-wine appellation of Sauternes – unwanted because 10% of the parcel, partially shaded by surrounding woods, was annually consumed by birds. Quirac’s solution
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was to harvest the shaded rows early and vinify them as dry white wine. Later, after botrytis cinerea, or noble rot, concentrates grape sugars in the rest of the vineyard, he mixes the sweet and dry wine, boosting acidity and complexity. “Only later did I learn I’d effectively stumbled onto the technique for making Tokaj [the legendary wine of Hungary, which is a mix of dry and sweet noble-rot wine]. All because I wanted to save my grapes from the birds.” His 600 bottles – boasting a refreshingly modern profile worlds apart from typical syrupy sauternes – are snapped up annually by Hong Kong wine merchants and Relais & Châteaux restaurants like Montreal’s Europea.
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n nearby Barsac, at Château Massereau (+33 55627 4662), brothers Jean-François and Philippe Chaigneau are resurrecting the wine that first engendered the mythos of Sauternes. Renowned for its wines until a century ago, the château’s vineyards were absorbed into a neighbouring Second Cru
CHATEAUX REVOLUTION
Classé – all except the 1.1 hectares surrounding the 16th-century edifice. Never industrialised, its original 85% semillon and 15% muscadelle planting intact, since 2000 these unadulterated, historical vineyards have yielded an otherworldly wine. The morning mists of the nearby Ciron create ideal conditions for the development of grape-desiccating botrytis cinerea. “The true definition of sauternes is a wine made from 100% botrytised confit roti [the ultimate level of neardry grape concentration], but that is no longer made today,” says Philippe. Except at Château Massereau – at incredible cost. In 2008, it took 11 passes over several days harvesting grape by grape with pickle tweezers to create just 450 litres of Château Massereau’s extraordinarily complex and opulent sauternes, Cuvée M. From their massive, beguiling 100% red petit verdot Cuvée Elliot – 600 bottles made – to their fabulous sauternes, Château Massereau defines haute couture wine. With a growing clientele in Paris and around the world, Château Massereau is finally being recognised for its inspired winemaking. “Too many of these winemakers have been working in the shadows for years,” says Paris sommelier Dupré. Take Christophe Landry of Château des Graviers (+33 55658 8911), whom Dupré was surprised he had never met until this year. The fifth-generation winemaker, obsessed with rediscovering the bouquet of his ancestors’ wine, has worked since the 1990s to re-create Margaux’s full historic aromatic palate, even recovering the all-but-extinct local carménère varietal from Margaux’s chamber of agriculture – preserved thanks to vines his own great-grandfather donated a century ago. Dupré found his wine staggering, redolent of earth and berries, and appropriately labelled: Cru Artisan. Bordeaux may be in crisis, but its artisan winemaking is not. If ever there were a recipe for renewal for a region with a storied history, it might well be found in a cru artisan.
Pesticide-free viticulture, horse ploughing, lowsulphur winemaking … apparently it’s not just for bohemian micro-wineries anymore. Today a growing number of Bordeaux’s most prestigious châteaux are reviving winemaking practices that haven’t been used on their historic estates since they received their Grand Cru rankings in 1855. Château Palmer (chateau-palmer.com), the 55ha Third Cru Classé estate in Margaux, hired Thomas Duroux as chief executive at 34 years old in 2004 to bring fresh perspective – and they got it. In 2005 he released a special “Historical XIXth Century Wine” cuvée, reviving an old tradition of blending fine Bordeaux wines with Côtes du Rhône. In 2008 he began experimenting with natural viticulture and, as of October 2013, Château Palmer’s vineyards are farmed 100% organically and biodynamically. Next, Duroux wants to reduce sulphur levels – his newest innovation involves adding yeast to the freshly harvested grapes on the sorting table as a sulphur-free antibacterial alternative. Château PontetCanet (pontet-canet.com) was in crisis when the Tesseron family acquired it in 1975, but today the Fifth Grand Cru Classé of Pauillac has regained
its former glory and then some. First abandoning herbicides in 2002, it had its first harvest using biodynamic viticulture in 2005. Three years later it began trading tractors for plough horses – and today they work 32 of the estate’s 80 hectares. In 2010, Pontet-Canet was certified 100% organic and biodynamic, and two years later further innovation led to partially vinifying wine in concrete amphorae, created from the estate’s own gravel and limestone soils. For their boldness, the Tesserons have been praised by critics like Robert Parker, who twice gave Pontet-Canet 100/100 scores. “A tour de force in winemaking,” Parker wrote of its 2009, “…one of the few biodynamic vineyards in Bordeaux, but you are likely to see many more, given the success that Tesseron seems to be having at all levels.”
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