Château Haut-Lagrange, Pessac-Leognan, Bordeaux

“It is always the adventurous who accomplish great things”

Charles de Montesquieu

By Paige Donner

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One early Spring afternoon on a recent trip to the Pessac-Leognan region of Bordeaux, I set off from my hotel on a bicycle in the sunshine. I had not gotten 10 minutes down the pretty grapevine-trimmed country road when the blue sky turned to gray and a drizzle suddenly manifested.

Leaving myself completely in the hands of nature in Montesquieu's childhood region, I took the first gravel-lined road that seemed to lead up to one of the wineries that appeared to have people present.  Not a moment too soon, someone spotted me just as the heavens poured forth the fresh Spring rain and ushered me into the vineyard warehouse where there was some serious bottling underway.

Once they perceived that I spoke English, the lady from the office was called over to welcome me. Her name ended up being Sandrine and she told me that I had wandered onto the Château Haut-Lagrange. Once I explained to her that I had just been out for an afternoon bike ride, she, with all manner of warmth and graciousness, offered to take me on a tour of the winery and allowed me to take pictures. Her English was impressive and she told me that with her husband she spoke Spanish.

She is the Château Haut-Lagrange co-manager and is the kind of person, that when you get the chance to speak with them, like on a rainstorm-Spring-afternoon, you really must count your blessings because not only did she tell me all about the vineyard, she also mentioned her favorite regional delicacy which are "acacia Beignets" or acacia doughnuts that you must eat fresh and which only come around once a year, in early May, when the acacia are in bloom.

AOC Graves

Château Haut-Lagrange is nestled right in with all the other AOC Graves wineries that are so close you can, and ought to, bicycle to them. Though it is one of the newer wineries in this prestigious Bordeaux region, it being the life-long ambition and family-run enterprise ofFrancis Boutemy, whose grandparents were once winemakers of Bordeaux.

Graves, Bordeaux

Graves is the only AOC to take its name from the soil. The soil is a mixture of gravel, pebbles, flint and other stony debris deposited by the Garonne River over the millennia. Pessac-Leognan is part of the Graves area and is the region where Château Haut-Lagrange is (also, Château Haut-Brion) but, technically, the vineyard is not AOC Pessac-Leognan since it was established in 1989, after the 1987 classification.

This is where it comes in handy to know your detailed geography of Bordeaux. If you only looked at the label of this fine wine that sells for about 14 - 20 Euro the bottle, white and red, you might miss the significance of the fact that it shares the same climate, terroir and soil as its neighbors such as Château Haut Bailly and Château Smith-Haut-Lafitte.

If there is a winery in Bordeaux that is high on my list of participating in a harvest, it is this one. Mr. Boutemy has engineered a grape-picking vehicle that allows the pickers to sit as it travels up and down the rows of vines. [Pictured Below].

The white wine is lovely and not afraid to show its fruit. Its top  note is acacia. Yes, add that one to your tasting library. Its strong minerality comes through fully in the mouth and the winemakers here do not subscribe to overly oaking their whites. Only 6,000 bottles of this lovely 50% Sauvignon, 50% Sémillon produced. You must buy a bottle to taste it as they don't have much stock left.

The red is cultivated from 7.5 hectares of Merlot (45%) and Cabernet-Sauvignon (55%). They lay a tier of the juice in new barrels, the rest they leave in the tank. Batonnage is in the barrel. Bottling comes 18 months after the harvest. The vintages available for tasting today are the '06 and '07. It is balanced, elegant, a good wine to accompany with raclettes, Indian food or spicy Antilles cuisine.  50,000 bottles. A good wine to keep for 3 - 10 years, depending on the vintage. It is a great buy. You are getting top Pessac-Leognan wine for about 1/3 of what most of the other bottles in the area sell for.

This winery is a must stop on your Bordeaux wine travels. Friendly, forthcoming Bordelaise wine folk, excellent wines and great prices. They want to talk wine with you.

Château Haut-Lagrange 89, Avenue de La Brède

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CHÂTEAU PICHON LONGUEVILLE, BORDEAUX

CHÂTEAU PICHON LONGUEVILLE, BORDEAUX

by: John Schreiner

READ MORE ON John Schreiner's Blog....

Photo: Gildas d'Ollone, general manager of Château Pichon

Bordeaux’s 1975 vintage was one of the most controversial in that decade. Most of the reds were markedly tannic. Tannin will always soften with age but the question is whether there is any fruit left by that time.

I have tasted a number of 1975s over the years. A few were satisfactory but many were lean and dried out.

And then I got to taste the 1975 Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande. It is a delightful wine, with mellowed tannin and with fruit still fresh and alive. The alluring bouquet shows that perfumed sweetness that happens when Cabernet Sauvignon spends a long time in the bottle. 

Perhaps this is all academic. It would be a rare cellar that still has any 1975 Bordeaux, if only because the wine should have been consumed by now. In his The Great Vintage Wine Book, Michael Broadbent – having tasted the wine in 1978 – recommended drinking it between 1983 and 1995. Well-stored red Bordeaux has remarkable longevity, however.

This bottle of 1975 came directly from the cellars of Château Pichon. Gildas d’Ollone, the winery’s general manager, presented this wine plus some current vintages at a recent Vancouver tasting for members of the Guild of Sommeliers.

He was supposed to be in Vancouver this spring at the Playhouse International Wine Festival. However, he was among the number of European producers who were prevented from coming when the volcano in Iceland basically shut down Europe’s air space. His wines were at the festival, presented by Sid Cross, one of Vancouver’s super-tasters and a friend of the Pichon wines.

Gildas had a second reason for coming to Vancouver this fall. Like most leading Bordeaux producers, Château Pichon is being besieged by buyers from China who would take all of the production if allowed.

“I want to keep our wines in traditional markets,” he says. “I don’t want to have all of our wines put into one basket.”

Château Pichon is one of the second growth estates in Pauillac, a neighbour of Château Latour, a first growth. The winery has records of vineyards from the late 1600s, when it and other properties were all owned by a very large landowner. In 1700 what became the Pichon vineyards formed the dowry when the landowner sent off his daughter to marry Jacques Pichon de Longueville, the president of the Bordeaux parliament.

Ownership has changed several times, usually driven by French inheritance laws. In 2007 the winery was on the market again because the family faced payment of inheritance taxes. A number of offers were made and the winner was Roederer, the great Champagne house.

Aside from making significant investments in the vineyard, Roederer has not messed around with this great chateau. Interested in maintaining the style of the Pichon wines, Roederer kept the staff intact (other than adding to the vineyard staff). The elegant Gildas d’Ollone, a nephew of the previous owner, remains the general manager.

What is the Pichon style? “We are not a blockbuster wine,” Gildas says. “We have never been. The challenge is to get balance with finesse.”

The winemaking has changed a lot since the 1975 vintage but balance and finesse would describe that wine. That was a warm, dry growing season. By September, the grapes hanging in the vineyard were small with thick skins, little juice and green seeds, a recipe for excessive tannin. Then the weather forecast threatened rain. Many producers chose to pick.    READ MORE ON John Schreiner's Blog....

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