After I first visited Bordeaux, the sleepy panorama of turreted stone châteaux and vineyards appeared timeless, with traditions so properly established you felt they might go on ceaselessly. However new power on this well-known wine area is seen and audible: bees buzz and sheep graze in natural vineyards; brand-new cellars brim with sustainable options and wine fermenting in stylish amphorae; uncommon grapes are gaining consideration; and the variety of ladies in key roles retains rising. Yoga among the many vines is unquestionably coming.
Change is Bordeaux’s new fixed, and revolutionary winemakers and château homeowners throughout each appellation are serving to to upend the established order.
Who’re they? They’re the youthful era, which has travelled broadly and sees the challenges of local weather change. They’re newcomers from elsewhere, bringing new concepts to estates they’ve bought. Crus classés are rethinking sustainability and issuing manifestos, just like the 2021 manifesto from Château Cheval Blanc on ‘selling (anti)standard viticulture’ – a name for a return to the rules of agroecology. Many different estates, some tiny, are making their names via uncommon cuvées and eco-conscious experiments.
Listed below are my picks for eight prime innovators within the area, who’re all making a distinction proper now.
Claire Villars Lurton
The ability of bushes
Claire Villars Lurton. Credit score: Sam Sargeant & Luke Carver
Heading up her household’s châteaux wasn’t Claire Villars Lurton’s authentic plan. However when her dad and mom died in an accident in 1992, she left her research as a physics doctoral pupil in Paris to tackle her winemaker mom’s function. She grew to become an oenologist, aiming from the begin to ‘come again to virtuous and ecologic viticulture’.
That path took her from rising cowl crops to natural and biodynamic certification on the estates she now owns – fifth progress Château Haut-Bages Libéral in Pauillac and Châteaux Ferrière (third progress) and La Gurgue in Margaux. Alongside the best way, she married Gonzague Lurton, proprietor of second progress Château Durfort-Vivens (and Jacques Lurton’s cousin). Collectively they purchased Château Domeyne in St-Estèphe and based an property in Sonoma.
At present she is one in all Bordeaux’s most enjoyable winemakers, main the best way in agroforestry and agroecology as one other method to create more healthy vines for the long run. ‘Final yr I began planting 120 bushes in the course of vine blocks,’ she says. The combination contains fruit and nut bushes and others just like the Siberian elm. Bushes assist soil retain water in scorching, dry years and encourage a mycorrhizal fungus community that will increase hint and mineral components within the soil.
She additionally launched the primary no-added sulphur wine from a cru classé (Haut-Bages Libéral) with the 2020 classic of Ceres (on sale in France at about €20-€24), sourced from an 8ha Merlot plot in Haut-Médoc, the place she is interplanting bushes and dealing in the direction of biodynamic certification.
Villars Lurton sees all her sustainable efforts as a protracted course of. She likes to say that it’s a journey, not a challenge.
Saskia de Rothschild
Revolutionary packaging design
Saskia de Rothschild. Credit score: Sam Sargeant & Luke Carver
When then 31-year-old Saskia de Rothschild took over Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite) in 2018, she made Bordeaux historical past because the youngest particular person to steer a primary progress. Then, final yr, she additionally grew to become the primary feminine CEO of DBR in its 150-year historical past. She’s completed a lot on the firm’s 5 Bordeaux châteaux, together with the
2021 publication of Château Lafite: The Almanac (£125 Flammarion). Modelled on a farmer’s almanac, it’s like a household picture album – an enormous departure from the boring format and uninteresting prose of conventional château books.
One splashy innovation is from Château Rieussec in Sauternes: a brand new bottle design, which debuted with the nice 2019 classic. Candy wines are significantly out of trend, and de Rothschild says the target of the bottle was ‘to get customers to fully change their notion’. The packaging (pictured right here) strikes away from ‘the codes of wine bottles’. It’s designed by Swiss firm Large Sport, utilizing opaque 95% recycled Wild Glass by Spanish glassmaker Estal, with a vivid yellow colour-block crown emblem on the entrance and a replaceable cork to remind wine lovers that Rieussec might be saved within the fridge for
a month as soon as opened.
De Rothschild says she hasn’t moved quick, reminding me that the conversion to natural farming in any respect their French estates began a decade in the past with trials. Château L’Evangile in Pomerol is already licensed natural, and the others are in conversion. Lafite has an agro- forestry programme underway.
‘The selections we take immediately are shaping the best way we’ll make wine in 50 years, so it’s our accountability to take our time,’ she says.
Jacques Lurton
Concepts from the New World
Jacques Lurton. Credit score: Deepix
Winemaker Jacques Lurton is a person always in movement. From an illustrious Bordeaux clan, he spent years consulting world wide and created his Islander Property on Kangaroo Island in Australia.
When he took over as president of Vignobles André Lurton in 2019 after the demise of his esteemed father André Lurton, he tapped that New World expertise for a brand new line of inexpensive single-varietal wines, together with a Muscadelle, underneath the Diane label, named after a statue of Roman goddess Diana within the backyard at Château Bonnet. He even plans a single-varietal Cabernet Franc at Château de Rochemorin in Pessac-Léognan.
‘I discovered an organization that was static,’ Lurton says. ‘I believed it was needed to present an enter to make it shine once more. I like discovering new angles that nobody has explored.’
His thoughts has been buzzing. With quite a few châteaux and greater than 600ha of vines, there’s loads of scope. In rethinking cru classé de Graves Château Couhins-Lurton, he launched a brand new white and purple, Acte ll, ageing them in uncommon horizontal sandstone amphorae to acquire pure expression of the fruit. At Château Bonnet (Entre-deux-Mers) he’s utilizing lighter bottles and recycled paper and ink for labels.
Lurton – introduced in April this yr as the brand new president of the Syndicat Viticole de Pessac-Léognan, following within the footsteps of his father who held the identical place for 18 years – is engaged on a method to shield in opposition to frost with none air pollution. He has additionally simply completed a cuvée known as Eden, produced underneath ‘bio-control’ circumstances utilizing pure merchandise for plant stimulation in a course of that’s ‘much like homeopathy’. And that’s just the start.
Guillaume Pouthier & Château Les Carmes Haut-Brion
New winemaking strategies
Guillaume Pouthier. Credit score: Sam Sargeant & Luke Carver
Actual property entrepreneur Patrice Pichet purchased fairly Château Les Carmes Haut-Brion in 2010, and set the property, located contained in the Bordeaux metropolis limits, on a quietly revolutionary path. The château is surrounded by a beautiful park with a lake and vines, however probably the most seen a part of its new life is the smooth, boat-shaped cellar that appears prefer it’s floating in a decorative pond, accessed by footbridges. Designed by Philippe Starck, it’s alleged to symbolise Bordeaux’s maritime historical past.
However I solely understood what’s behind the intense enchancment within the wines by speaking to intense, charismatic technical director Guillaume Pouthier, whom Pichet employed from Rhône powerhouse Chapoutier.
In 2012, Pouthier launched the concept of placing entire bunches of grapes, stems and all, within the fermentation vats: one thing we affiliate with Burgundy. He says it really works as a result of the winery is principally Cabernet Franc on clay and limestone.
Pouthier goals for wines with vivid aromas and a wider span of drinkability, which led him to a different innovation: utilizing infusion reasonably than extraction with pumpovers throughout fermentation. This light, hands-off methodology, he says, creates softer tannins, whereas ageing wines 10% in clay amphorae, begun in 2015, helps give the wines power.
Contemporary and sophisticated, with a beautiful silky texture, the wines converse for the success of the strategies. What’s subsequent? ‘I’m nonetheless maturing, ageing my concepts like wine,’ says Pouthier.
Joséphine Duffau-Lagarrosse
Rethinking her heritage
Joséphine Duffau-Lagarrosse. Credit score: Sam Sargeant & Luke Carver
It’s an oh-so acquainted Bordeaux story. Shareholders of a household property wish to money in. A member of the younger era desires to maintain it however can’t afford to purchase them out.
In 2021, the story of St-Emilion’s Château Beauséjour (Héritiers Duffau-Lagarrosse), a premier grand cru classé that makes gorgeous lush wines, had a happier ending. That’s as a result of two 30-year-old ladies believed in their very own skills and shared a imaginative and prescient. A era in the past, they in all probability couldn’t have pulled it off.
Formidable ninth-generation Joséphine Duffau-Lagarrosse pitched the funding to Prisca Courtin-Clarins, whose household owns Clarins cosmetics, and who manages her household’s investments. The duo put collectively a deal, the Courtin household’s first wine world foray. Regardless of an earlier sale settlement, French agricultural land company SAFER awarded the property to the pair (a part of their mandate is to assist younger farmers) to maintain the reference to the historic household and thanks partly to their sustainability and biodiversity imaginative and prescient.
Winemaker Joséphine, who has labored in Napa, New Zealand, Mexico and Bordeaux, shortly took cost, re-blending the present 2020 assemblage to indicate extra freshness, and included 19% Cabernet Franc due to its high quality. The 2021 classic was troublesome, however she is pleased with the stability and vibrancy that she says is ‘my fashion’ and employed a brand new guide staff, together with Dr Axel Marchal (recipient of the Decanter Rising Star award in 2021).
The longer term? She says: ‘I would like Beauséjour to be in comparison with the nice wines of the world.’
Yannick Reyrel
Remaking Petit Verdot & Fronsac
Yannick Reyrel. Credit score: Sam Sargeant & Luke Carver
When he was director at Haut-Médoc Château Belle-Vue south of Margaux, Yannick Reyrel up to date the picture of Petit Verdot – a late- ripening grape selection historically utilized in small portions in some Bordeaux blends, typically to reinforce color and tannic depth or floral character. From 80-year-old vines, Reyrel created a smooth and spicy 100% Petit Verdot wine, ageing partly in terracotta amphora. This highlight on the grape’s solo potential has impressed others to take the grape extra significantly.
Now, Reyrel, as soon as assistant to Jean-Claude Berrouet at Petrus in Pomerol, has taken revolutionary concepts to the underrated Fronsac appellation on the Proper Financial institution, upgrading Château de Carles and its status wine Haut- Carles. He factors out that the area has the identical soils because the rather more well-known St-Emilion plateau and that local weather change has benefited its terroir.
Reyrel introduced the best way of working at grands crus classés to the property and the area, replanting with a massal choice (replanting vineyards utilizing cuttings from the best-quality previous vines on an property) from an previous plot of Cabernet Franc on St-Emilion’s plateau, introducing a densimetric grape-sorting desk (separating by density or relative gravity) – the primary in Fronsac, he says – and putting in new tanks formed like upside-down pyramids to create softer, extra velvety wines. Will all this assist to replace Fronsac’s picture? He hopes so.
Thomas Duclos of Oenoteam
Guide for a brand new fashion
Thomas Duclos. Credit score: Sam Sargeant & Luke Carver
Bordeaux’s oenology consultants assist form a château’s wine fashion greater than most individuals realise. Bearded Thomas Duclos of Oenoteam is the brand new rising star, particularly on the Proper Financial institution. Up to now few years, he’s signed on with prime properties, resembling Château Troplong Mondot, that had been beforehand suggested by Michel Rolland. Style the latest wines and also you see a dramatic shift to the more energizing, extra delicate fashion taking maintain in St-Emilion.
Duclos is on the forefront of the departure from the turbo-charged, oaky, high-octane fashion favoured by the iconoclastic garagiste motion that emerged within the appellation within the Nineteen Nineties. ‘The phrase “more energizing” is much too simplistic,’ Duclos says. His imaginative and prescient has at all times been about stability, magnificence, precision, purity, nuance. He credit a brand new era at properties, in addition to a brand new group of critics, for now championing this fashion.
In 2005, he began work within the lab in Libourne that was revamped as Oenoteam, which he co-founded, in 2011. ‘Making nice wines means bringing a spot and all its nuances into the bottle,’ he says. Anticipate his imaginative and prescient to unfold to many extra estates in coming years.
Tristan Le Lous & Château Cantenac Brown
Earth-driven sustainability
Tristan Le Lous. Credit score: Cristina Dogliani
The Médoc is house to many glamorous cellars, however you received’t have the ability to see Château Cantenac Brown’s distinctive homage-to-the-earth chai till 2023, when Burgundian businessman Tristan Le Lous, whose household purchased this third progress Margaux property in 2019, is to unveil a zero-carbon footprint model that’s constructed from the land.
Le Lous employed pioneering architect Philippe Madec to create a 5,000m2 cellar that might fully combine the constructing with the atmosphere. The result’s a rammed raw-earth development that makes use of compressed blocks of clay and sand combined on the château to type thick earth partitions with a wood framework. It would preserve the right temperature and humidity for ageing wine with out resorting to air con.
In one other nod to the earth, in Might, Cantenac Brown issued a ‘non-fungible token’, titled The Energy of the Earth. Finland-based artist David Popa created a biodegradable ‘fresco’ on the plateau in entrance of the property, from a combination of earth and pure pigments, to be washed away by the primary rain. The NFT is a video of its creation that was auctioned off to boost funds for the Conservatoire du Littoral, a French conservation organisation, saving virgin land from urbanisation. Le Lous goals of extra. ‘I might love to have the ability to run all of the vineyard tools on electrical energy and fully get rid of the usage of oil,’ he says.
