Bordeaux 2016 by Jancis Robinson Pauillac The big news in Pauillac at the end of last month was the fact that the Cazes family of Ch Lynch-Bages had just acquired Ch Haut-Batailley from the aunt of Xavier Borie of Ch Grand-Puy-Lacoste, who has been responsible for making Ch Haut-Batailley up to and including the 2016 vintage. In a telling break with tradition, Xavier Borie and his daughter Emeline did not show Haut-Batailley this year (and nor did the Cazes family) so I therefore have no note on it and I wonder therefore whether it is a wine that will fall through the cracks of the deal. In the picture above right Borie puts on a brave face in his immaculate Grand-Puy-Lacoste chai. Xavier Borie's old friend Jean-Michel Cazes reports that the Haut-Batailley chai is every bit as well designed and well equipped as the Grand-Puy-Lacoste one, and is thrilled by the new acquisition not least because only a fraction of the land that qualifies as Haut-Batailley is currently planted so there is considerable potential. (I believe others looked at the estate too.) This is a time of considerable upheaval for the Cazes family not least because the Ch Lynch-Bages chai is being completely rebuilt, as you can see from the picture I took that is reproduced immediately below. Below that is the garage next to the winery on the outskirts of Pauillac in which Lynch-Bages is currently operating while the rebuilding is going on in Bages.
The trend towards organic and biodynamic viticulture continues apace in Pauillac, not least at Ch Latour, where they are at the end of their first year of organic conversion. In the picture below, you can see one of their team of 12 horses in the distance. At Ch Pontet-Canet, the pioneer of horses in Pauillac vineyards, Alfred Tesseron has now been joined by his daughter Justine, while his niece Melanie is exploring pastures new. She was not the only daughter I met for the first time in Bordeaux. It was heartening to go straight from Mouton, where the late Baroness Philippine's sons Philippe and Julien were very much in evidence, even at our extremely early appointment at 8.45 am (Bravi!) to Lafite to find Saskia de Rothschild, daughter of Baron Eric, in the tasting room and clearly extremely interested in the detail of wine production. She of course deferred to technical director Eric Kohler, who reported that 2016 'was a surprising vintage because of its delicacy; we expected hard wines because of the high tannin content but not at all. We had a very small Cabernet Sauvignon crop but we still had to select out the grapes that suffered most in the drought. Lafite's yields were lower than in 2015 simply because of the small berry size. We had lots of bunches so we crop-thinned quite a bit. In a vintage like this, a yield of 50 hl/ha can be too much in such a dry year. Lowering yields helps minimise vine shutdown.' (A contrary view to that of Alexandre Thienpont of Vieux Château Certan.) At Ch Latour, they had an average yield of 33 hl/ha but président Frédéric Engerer was dismissive of placing too much emphasis on this figure, pointing out that it included some parcels of extremely old, low-yielding vines, but also 'some new vines that are making great wine at 52 hl/ha'. He and technical director Hélène Génin were clearly thrilled with their 2016 vintage. 'Even the pips were ripe.' They discussed the fashionable technique of barrel fermentation for reds and admitted they had a 10-barrel trial but didn't sound any more enthusiastic about it than about the painstaking business of destemming grapes by hand as Leroy famously do in Burgundy. 'We tried it on two little cuves in Bordeaux too', said Engerer, 'but I think it's a bit artificial unless the grapes are extremely raw. It also adds about 10 a bottle to production costs because it takes such a lot of labour.' He described his 2016s are fresher and more persistent than his 2015s. It is probably difficult to tell in the picture of the Latour vineyards below, but the vines in Bordeaux are in general quite dangerously advanced and fingers are tightly crossed that the young buds will not fall victim to spring frosts - which could have an impact on pricing of the 2016s.
St-Julien I enjoyed the St-Juliens I tasted in the not-very-romantic Hangar 14 on the quayside in Bordeaux where the official Union de Grands Crus tastings were held this year. (We were told that the football stadium about which I wrote here last year was unavailable.) In St-Julien itself my tastings were dominated by two very different Brunos, the flamboyant Bruno Borie of Ch Ducru-Beaucaillou, who declared 'this is a new era in my life, no more Beyoncé, but biblical and spiritual influences instead', and Bruno Rolland, the usually pokerfaced winemaker for Jean-Hubert Delon at Ch Léoville-Las-Cases, who this year couldn't hide his delight with his 2016s. Everyone was agreed that the 35 mm of rain on 13 September that ended the near-two-month drought was the saviour of the season and restarted the ripening process. 'The vines were blocked and the grapes were nothing like ready before the mid-september rains', said Borie. 'We were scared they would never ripen. There were a full 125 days between flowering and
picking. September days were shorter than in midsummer, and it was quite cool at night. But that meant the grapes enjoyed a long, slow maturation. By 15 September we were scared that rot would set in but fortunately it didn't.' Jean-Hubert Delon arrived in a cloud of cigar smoke halfway through his winemaker Bruno's thrilled presentation of the vintage and admitted it may be the best vintage he has even known. 'The best will last forever.' There is never a shortage of structure in the wines of the Las Cases stable but with these 2016s I loved the fact that there was so much richness in evidence, and such ripe tannins, as well as the usual mineral imprint. In the picture below, Delon shows off a special case of varietal 1986s (a Petit Verdot, a Cabernet Franc, a Merlot, a Cabernet Sauvignon and two bottles of the final blend, together with glasses, a funnel and a measuring cylinder for you to make your own blend) he has put together. I also saw Didier Cuvelier at Ch Léoville Poyferré who grrrr has decided to withdraw from the UGC tastings, thereby adding to an already crammed itinerary. Cuvelier pointed out that even during the drought of July and August, temperatures were reasonably moderate, hardly ever over 30 ºC. St-Estèphe I was also extremely conscious of the man who represents the third Léoville, Anthony Barton of Chx Léoville Barton and Langoa Barton. On my last day in Bordeaux I had the enormous pleasure of lunch at Langoa with Anthony's wife, daughter and winemaking granddaughter Eva, Lilian and Mélanie respectively and enjoyed two great wines (Léoville Barton 1986 and Langoa Barton 1982) chosen by Anthony, who wasn't feeling 100% that day. Mélanie, incidentally, is making wine at Ch Mauvesin-Barton, their new property in Moulis that is surely following the family tradition of offering real value. St-Estèphe usually comes into its own in dry years so it was no great surprise to find some fine 2016s here not all of them likely to be very expensive. I was generally impressed by the 2016s from this commune, whose (apparently almost taste-able!) gravels lie over usefully water-retaining clay, which seems to have imbued the wines with particularly good freshness. Cos d'estournel continues its path to refreshment. At Ch Montrose, currently going organic and sustainable, Hervé Berland stressed the benefits of this unusually unparcellated estate for its position close to the cooling influence of the Gironde, but admitted that the vines were stressed by the end of August. At Ch Calon-Ségur, Vincent Millet was singing the praises of Cabernet Franc in 2016. He included all of it in the grand vin, in which it constituted a substantial 18%. The alcohols at Calon were higher than most, hitting 14%. They didn't pick their Merlot until 29 September to 4 October while the Cabernets were picked 5 to 15 October, the same end date as at Cos - pretty late for the left bank. He claimed that in Cabernets in 2016, 'the three maturities coincided: phenolic, aromatic and technical', pointing out that the tannin levels were the same as in 2010 but the additional acidity in 2016 makes the wines taste more lifted and refreshing. He is particularly proud of the seniority of his vines at Calon. The Petit
Verdot was planted in 1939, the Merlot in 1942 (brave!), the Cabernet Franc in 1965 and the Cabernet Sauvignon in 1985 and yet they managed an average yield of 42 hl/ha. The other wine made at Calon, now called Ch Capbern (rather than Ch Capbern Gasqueton), could be one of the bargains of the vintage. I have included it in my long list of particularly successful less expensive left-bank wines that I will publish on Saturday. Incidentally, over dinner at his bistro Lavinal in Bages with Jean-Michel Cazes the night before tasting these St-Estèphes, at which a particularly sweet Ormes de Pez 1955 was served, he reminisced that in the 1950s in the Médoc, the three major winemakers were Philippe Capbern- Gasqueton at Ch Calon-Ségur, his grandfather at Ch Lynch-Bages and Jean Bouteiller at Ch Pichon Baron (and Lanessan). Jean-Michel Cazes (below, with an Army & Navy Stores bottling of Ch Lynch-Bages 1959) is surely the leading current repository of Médocain history. He is well into his eighties even though he doesn't look it. Someone (Jane Anson?) take a tape recorder to him, please.