Best of Bordeaux

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Everything you always wanted to know about

Bordeaux but were afraid to ask.

With 200 portraits of brands

every wine enthusiast should know.

Rolf Bichsel

Best of

BORDEAUX

200 legendary châteaux and their wines

Knowledge | History | Travel

‘Best of Bordeaux'

A publication by VINUM, Europe's wine magazine

©

November 2016, first edition, Intervinum AG, ZUrich

ISBN Print: 978-3-033-05899-6

ISBN E-Book: 978-3-033-05916-0

AUTHOR

Rolf Bichsel

EDITOR

Roland Köhler

PUBLISHER

Intervinum AG, Zurich

www.vinum.ch

Publishing manager: Nicola Montemarano

Assistant/coordinator: Barbara Schroeder

Marketing: Dana Muñoz

Sales: Peter Heer, Catherine Sereno

Assistant/administration: Manuela Deganello

DESIGN, IMAGES AND PRODUCTION

Cover image and graphics concept: Marco Bräm

Translation: Hancock-Hutton, Bordeaux

Photos: Vinmedia, Bordeaux

Production: Hans Graf

This document is protected by copyright.

All copyright and publishing rights for this publication, in whole or in part, are reserved.

Any use or exploitation of this in whole or in part, in particular translation, reprinting, duplication, microfilming,

storage and use on optical or electronic data carriers, requires written permission from the publishers. Use of this

document shall in principle generate a payment liability. Violations are subject to the sanctions of copyright law.

The content of this issue has been carefully checked. However, the authors, editors and publishers accept no

responsibility for its accuracy.

Legal notice

New NOMOS watches for premieres, podiums, and parties:

such as Tangente neomatik nachtblau, depicted here. Find this

and other timepieces with the NOMOS swing system and the

automatic movement of the next generation now at selected

retailers. More at nomos-store.com, nomos-glashuette.com.

!Bon appétit+ with Bordeaux.

Bordeaux wines are a delight. Discover fine wines from our extensive range of Bordeaux

and en primeur wines, suitable for red meat or hearty dishes. You can find additional wine

recommendations at mondovino.ch. Coop does not sell wine to young people under age

18. Available at large Coop supermarkets and at coopathome.ch and mondovino.ch

Our wine experts recommend:

Pessac-Léognan Grand Vin

Château Haut-Bergey

2011, 75 cl

33.95

(10 cl = 4.53)

Les Tourelles de Longueville

2e Vin du Château Pichon

Baron 2012, 75cl

39.50

(10 cl = 5.27)

Saint-Emilion Grand Cru

Château La Tour Figeac

2012, 75 cl

38.95

(10 cl = 5.19)

7

Foreword

I ran aground in Bordeaux in 1986 as a pia-

nist in a jazz club, and stayed on. I wanted

to keep tinkling the ivories and ended up do-

ing so, just di

ff

erently to how I imagined. Be-

cause life sometimes takes us in unexpected

directions, I became a wine writer and my

new home became my subject matter. Ever

since, I have tasted hundreds of great Bor-

deaux wines every year, with a degree of

shame as wine is not designed to be spat

out. Bordeaux has changed radically over these past 30 years. There is no other

region producing such quantities of such stylish wines. Bordeaux has an unfor-

tunate reputation for producing rare luxury products, but in reality the peak has

become much broader, and even so-called lesser vintages offer wines which are

outstanding in terms of both price and style. There are hundreds of good Bor-

deaux wines, only a few of which are expensive objects of speculation. On my

first en primeur tour, there were barely a dozen tasters trying 120 wines. Today,

several thousand Bordeaux palates (or aspiring palates) taste up to a thousand

wine samples over the course of a week without any guilty conscience what-

soever. There is also a downside to the sheer quantity of interesting Bordeaux.

Whilst people who knew a couple of dozen labels and three top vintages could

once call themselves connoisseurs, now it takes a university degree. This book is

an (insu

ffi

cient) attempt to turn the tide. I have tried – with all the compromises

and inconsistencies such an undertaking entails – to reduce the top Bordeaux

wines everyone should know to 200 brands. This is the best overview I can of-

fer of my world of fine Bordeaux, whilst also including a few other lesser-known

estates as representatives of the many others. All of this is based on my own

experience: I make no claim to objectivity when it comes to wine.

I originally wanted to reduce the historical notes about the estates to a couple

of lines which could be read anywhere. When compiling the first portraits, I was

tearing my hair out wondering whether I was repeating the error of cheerfully

repeating all of the commonly held misconceptions ever published, but my

Bernese stubbornness required a di

ff

erent approach. Checking sources and his-

torical data, studying marriage certificates and trawling through online archives

cost me an extra year of work. However, the subject matter was worth the effort:

true Bordeaux history contains ten times more adventure than what is usually

peddled.

Rolf Bichsel

Bordeaux lives

8

Contents

200 years of wine adventure

The Bordeaux story 10

Fact and fiction 12

Ausonius and the Romans 14

Bordeaux melting pot 18

The New French Claret 20

New luxury 24

Early years 26

Trade triangle 29

Fairy-tale chateaus 32

Class society 33

1855 classification 34

Global trade 38

Brand and style 41

The theatre of aging 42

Profit calculations 44

The Bordeaux-makers 45

Division of labour 48

Oenologists 51

History overview 53

9

Geography and appellations

Médoc and Haut-Médoc 54

Pessac-Léognan, Sauternes, Graves 56

Saint-Emilion, Pomerol 57

Map of listed estates

Right bank 58

South Bordeaux 60

Médoc and Haut-Médoc 62

Guidance 64

200 legendary châteaux and their wines from A to Z 67

Travel and discover

269

City of Bordeaux 270

Right bank 272

South, Médoc and Atlantic 273

Selected addresses for visitors to Bordeaux 274

Bordeaux service

Cuisine 280

Glass and decanter 282

Storage and aging 285

Vintage overview 288

l

10

Introduction

200 years of

wine adventure

Bordeaux is one of the oldest winemaking regions in the world.

However, what we know as ‘grand vin' (‘great wine') first emer-

ged during the 17th and 18th centuries. This development invol-

ved immigrants from a variety of countries – Bordeaux wine is a

universal product to the core.

The Bordeaux story

Success did not come about by accident, and great wines are born of great

terroirs: ‘mother vine' (as the cliché has it) is happiest growing in sand, gravel

and clay, sinking her roots deep into the womb of grandmother earth and bus-

ily siphoning mineral crystals, vitamins and aromas into her grapes that grow

and thrive before becoming Lafite Rothschild. Ten little Romans are said to

have discovered the excellent terroirs of the Gironde, laid down their spears and

cultivated the ancient Cabernet Sauvignon. Dionysus served as their wine con-

sultant and was outwitted by Bacchus who introduced barrel aging, and if they

had not died laughing they would still be blithely fertilising wine history with

absurd rubbish. If terroir were reduced to such ridiculous tales, then two thirds

of Bordeaux would onlybe only be good for growing radishes.

The truth is much more prosaic. As the Gauls – or more precisely, the Gallo-

Romans – liked to put a few drinks away (their only other pleasures were bread

and games) and wine was too expensive to import, they began planting their

own vines in around the second half of the first century. To do so, they first

11

needed a grape variety that could withstand the capricious Atlantic climate:

Biturica, mentioned by Pliny the Elder and the agronomist Columella, and pos-

sibly a cross of varieties introduced from Spain and the Balkans. They planted

this wherever space could be found, gobbling up the terroir. And when they har-

vested more wine than they could drink, they sent the surplus to the newly con-

quered northern provinces of Brittany and Britain which had no lack of thirsty

throats but had had no success in growing vines despite numerous attempts to

select more resistant varieties. This required ships and a port, and Burdigala was

thus founded (thank you Jupiter), at least if historians are to be believed, as their

friends the archaeologists have not yet managed to find the Roman docks which

they presume to have existed in the most enterprising locations of the city.

One thing is certain: Bordeaux became the largest, most important wine city

in the world, as the half-moon-shaped meander of the Garonne – into which

numerous streams flow and where the original inhabitants of Bordeaux estab-

lished a settlement – was not only easy to defend, it also proved to be a perfect

natural port thanks to all the inflows from rivers such as the Lot, Tarn, Aveyron,

Baïse and Gers which chose the Garonne as their outlet. Then, and now, it acts as

an interchange and is the inevitable final stage of a journey from the hinterland

(nearly a quarter of modern France) along the almost 100 kilometre Gironde

estuary to the Atlantic, and offers links to the world's interconnected oceans.

In Bordeaux, the tides are still so strong that the river goes into reverse every

eight hours – acting as the perfect outboard motor for Roman galleys. By the first

century AD, Burdigala was already an emporium and a trade port, as recorded

by the historian Strabo.

Without its port, Bordeaux would now be part of a region called Libourne

rather than the other way around, for the right bank of the Dordogne in Saint-

Emilion – where Atlantic influences are more tempered and olive trees and cork

oaks are able to survive in clay and gravel soils – contained what was an ideal

Lafite Rothschild

12

History Fact and fiction

winemaking terroir for the Romans, rather than the sandy and gravelly river

sediment on the left bank of the Garonne to the north and west of the city where

the Romans probably grew their vines, or the scree to the south which Bordeaux

locals planted from the 16th century. And least of all on the gravel hilltops of

the Médoc, which only became accessible all year round once Dutch engineers

had drained the surrounding marshes using a sophisticated system of channels

and sluices. But even so, Saint-Emilion and Pomerol, whose winemaking his-

tory apparently has Roman roots (the name is a reference to fruit cultivation,

with ‘poma' meaning apple but also fruit in general, so why not grapes?), stood

at the gates of the city of Libourne, which failed to rival Bordeaux despite its

small port. Rural Libourne thus produced wine primarily for personal use until

the mid-18th century.

In fact, the ditches and furrows which the Romans supposedly carved out of

the limestone rock to facilitate the rooting of their vines (as mentioned in nu-

merous scholarly books) have been shown by recent research to date from the

18th century. Furthermore, scholars have long been arguing about the location

of the remains of the grandiose Villa Lucaniacus belonging to Roman statesman

and poet Ausonius. But they are hardly likely to be slumbering in Saint-Emilion

and are thus of no use as proof of the wonderful wines which the town is sup-

posed to have already been producing at the time.

Arnaud II. de Pontac

13

Fact and fiction

Ausonius went down in Bordeaux history because he scratched ‘Oh father-

land, famous for its vines' into a clay tablet, inscribed it on parchment or some

other material, and also noted in passing that he owned around 25 hectares of

vineyards alongside a few hundred hectares of agricultural land. This does not

mean very much, however, as no true Roman estate would have done otherwise,

as wine was a way of raking in extra wealth, prompting Diodorus Siculus to com-

ment in the first century BC: ‘The avaricious temperament of many Roman trad-

ers exploits the Gallic passion for wine. On the boats which follow the waterways

or by wagons which roll across the plain, they transport wine, from which they

make fantastic profits, going as far as trading one amphora for one slave, in such

manner that the buyer brings his servant to pay for the drink.'

The Roman scholar, politician and poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius was born

in Bordeaux in around 310 (other sources refer to Vasate or Bazas) and died after

a long career in 395 on his family's estate in la Réole in southern Gironde. There is

virtually nothing to associate him with Saint-Emilion. The legend that he owned

a winery there emerged in the 17th or 18th century, and I cannot help thinking

that there are prevailing mercantile and chauvinist interests in this interpretation

of history. Here are the facts: Ausonius's writings mention a villa called Lucani-

acus which ‘could rival a palace in Rome' and could apparently be reached from

Ausonius

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15

Ausonius and the Romans History

Condat with a team of mules. In 1806, local historian Suffrein published a history

of Libourne, which he took to be the former Condat. In Gallic the name means

a place located at a confluence: today around 100 different ‘condats' have been

identified from those times, including what are now Cognac and Angers. Libourne

does not appear on the list. It was on the basis of this meagre evidence that Suf-

frein established Ausonius' villa as being in Saint-Emilion, where Gallo-Roman

artefacts have indeed been found. However, after archaeologists found the foun-

dations of a large Roman villa near Saint-André / Montagne, Suffrein's thesis was

dismissed as pure fabrication. Researchers still argue about which excavations

can be attributed to Ausonius, who owned estates in Bordeaux and Saintes but

spent a large part of his life in Milan and Trier. Whether Suffrein (whose thesis

sought primarily to demonstrate the importance of Libourne as far back as Ro-

man times) was influenced by Jean Cantenat, who renamed his estate with the

unpronounceable name of Rocblancan as “Ausone” in around 1781, or was instead

inspired by the research findings of local historians and amateur archaeologists,

is something we will probably never know. One thing is certain: during this pe-

riod, various other estates in the region (Pétrus, Conseillante and Beauséjour)

also gained finer-sounding (and thus more tempting) names. This small digres-

sion should not be viewed as an accusation of the falsification of history, but is

rather simply designed to illustrate how fact and fiction are often intertwined in

Bordeaux.

Since the most important Atlantic port in southern France came to be in Bor-

deaux, the ocean is still shaping its destiny today, and Bordeaux became the

northernmost part of south-western France to continue successfully growing

fine red wine – for Bordeaux is on the Atlantic, and not on the Mediterranean or

even the Amazon despite many opinions to the contrary! True Bordeaux locals

never go out without a cap and an umbrella, not to mention the local women

who are constantly on the alert and generally under cover, always holding onto

their skirts when walking through the city: if Billy Wilder had filmed ‘Some Like

It Hot' in Bordeaux rather than New York in 1959, Marilyn Monroe's lovely knees

could have been exposed without the need for subway grating. Here the west

wind howls, bringing rain, gales and legendary summer storms, the weather is

sometimes so capricious that the mercury gets the hiccups, and without check-

ing the weather report it is impossible to know whether you should be pulling on

a T-shirt or a woollen jumper, in the height of summer or the depths of winter.

‘A true Bordelais', as I was told with a raised finger by none other than Jacques

Chaban-Delmas, ‘never goes out walking without an umbrella'. I did it anyway

and turned up at an appointment to interview the city's legendary former may-

or soaked to the skin, dripping on the polished and waxed parquet floor of the

city hall like fresh laundry throughout our conversation. On 4 August 2003, the

thermometer here shot up to an exuberant 40.7 degrees Celsius, but on 8 August