The new-wave Bordeaux wines breaking with tradition

Our cellar is relatively small. There is room for about 2,500 bottles in double-depth racks on three sides of a windowless chamber maintained at a steady 13C. I’d love not to be using energy to keep our beloved bottles in good condition and envy those living in European cities where subterranean storage is a given. But we live on the top floor of a London building that’s less than 10 years old. No chance of a proper cellar that stays cool naturally.

The floor space in front of the racks in our wine storage space, as perhaps it should be called, is just 1.65 sq m, a small area that tends to be heavily stacked with all sorts of boxes and carriers of wine and various foodstuffs as this room doubles usefully as a larder. (The Cotswolds cellar of my FT predecessor Edmund Penning-Rowsell also doubled as a larder but his ran to two spacious rooms, both truly underground and effortlessly chilly.)

All this preamble is a rather pathetic attempt to explain how I managed to overlook a carton with two extremely exciting wines in it for five months. It had been delivered by Pierre Lurton, president of two of Bordeaux’s most famous wines, Chx d’Yquem and Cheval Blanc, and his wife, wine writer Alexandra Forbes. But on arrival, it was promptly covered by many other boxes.

What I can say is that the wines were worth the wait. They are made on Lurton’s estate near Grézillac in the far north of the Entre Deux Mers region, south-west of St-Émilion, about 12km south of Ch Cheval Blanc as the crow flies. Lurton started out with just 11ha of vineyards in the early 1990s but has been gradually extending his vine holdings so that they now comprise a total of 41ha, including some particularly old vines.

The two wines I was bowled over by come from Ch Marjosse. Until recently, serviceable but not outstanding red AOC Bordeaux and white Entre Deux Mers blends were all that it produced but, since 2017, the team has been led by recently hired technical director Jean-Marc Domme and has been experimenting with much smaller lots of wines based on the best combinations of vine variety and individual plot.

They’re branded Anthologie de Marjosse, and most of the eight wines in the range are named after a bird pictured on the recently redesigned labels. The first I tasted was Cuvée Palombe, named after a pigeon. It’s a startlingly rich white based on 45- to 70-year-old vines. The blend is a third each of Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc and the more perfumed Sauvignon Gris, but seems to me to be dominated by the lovely beeswax and lanolin flavours of fully ripe Sémillon, a grape variety more often encountered in sweet white Bordeaux. (Though admittedly, because selling Sauternes is such a struggle nowadays, more and more Sémillon is being made into dry wine in that sweet white wine region.)

I originally tasted the wine at room temperature. It seemed almost fat, until a nice cooling breeze of Sauvignon Blanc blew across my palate on the finish. The wine benefited from being restored to the cellar before I tasted it next. It was, again, such a welcome and characterful contrast to the technically perfect Sauvignon-dominated style that has become typical of Bordeaux Blanc.

Cuvée Palombe comes in a tall, straight-sided Bordeaux bottle and carries the Bordeaux appellation, so its origins are pretty clear. But if you were to come across the other wine in my carton, you would be hard-pressed to work out where it came from. Cuvée Ortolan 2019 is labelled Vin de France and comes in a (too-heavy) sloping-shouldered Burgundy bottle. It’s based on 25-year-old Cabernet Franc vines grown on what must be a particularly propitious plot of clay-limestone, the typical soil type of Bordeaux’s right bank.

Cabernet Franc, parent of Cabernet Sauvignon and in Bordeaux frequently regarded as its inferior, is associated with a powerful perfume that I tend to describe as “pencil shavings”. The wines are not usually especially full-bodied. This offering in the Anthologie de Marjosse series is not the most typical Cabernet Franc but is almost irresistible in its winning combination of freshness and ripeness, admittedly made in a pretty warm vintage in Bordeaux. It has great intensity and roundness so that it’s already a delight to drink, the tannins exhibiting the “cashmere” quality that I remember Pierre Lurton touting at Ch Cheval Blanc as long ago as 2005. This Cuvée Ortolan is named after the rare, tiny birds that are regarded as a delicacy (though an illegal one at that) and apparently nest in the forests around Ch Marjosse. I was subsequently able to taste the 2018 vintage of Cuvée Ortolan and can vouch for its outstanding quality too.

No one could enjoy the finest classical wines of Bordeaux at their mature apogee more than me, but I can’t tell you how delighted I am to see increasing evidence of new sorts of wines coming out of the Gironde department. The Anthologie range, which includes wines based on other traditional Bordeaux grape varieties, Malbec, Muscadelle and three Merlots from adjacent plots, also includes an incomer from Burgundy, Chardonnay. They’re priced at more than £30 a bottle by their UK importer Jascots but that seems fair enough to me. Thirty pounds doesn’t go very far in the Bordeaux fine wine market and these wines are arguably much more distinctive than most Bordeaux selling at this price level.

But Marjosse is not the only source of such innovation. By coincidence, at the same time I discovered that hidden duo, I was sent a very similar range of new wines based on superior plots of single grape varieties by negociants Dourthe. Its collection of three new bottlings, devised by its R&D “Lab” and named Les Parcellaires, also includes one based on Sémillon and one on Cabernet Franc. Sémillon 54 2020 is named so because the vines were planted at Ch Rahoul in Graves way back in 1954. This all-Sémillon wine is a little livelier and, of course, younger than the Cuvée Palombe 2019, perhaps in part because a third of it was aged in fashionable amphorae — as all clay vessels are called by wine people now, whatever their shape, to the disgust of classicists.

A whole two-thirds of Les Parcellaires La Gravière Cabernet Sauvignon 2020, another wine from Ch Rahoul in Graves, was aged in amphorae, resulting in an energetic version of this varietal. Less impressive to my mind is the rather skinny Peykem Cabernet Franc 2020, named after a plot in Ch Reysson in the Haut-Médoc. But the trio is not overpriced: €132 from Dourthe’s own website for a case of six bottles of any one of them seems reasonable for a spotlight on individuality in Bordeaux. Only 2,500 bottles of each have been produced.

Bordeaux was long known as a region famous for blended wine, the idea being that growing Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, as well as perhaps a little Malbec and Petit Verdot, offered vintners some insurance in a variable climate that often prejudiced the flowering or ripening of a single variety. Now that summers are much warmer, single-variety wines are presumably easier to produce than they once were. Not that Pétrus and Le Pin, Bordeaux’s most expensive wines, seem to have suffered from being 100 per cent Merlot.

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. More stockists from Wine-searcher.com

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