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Domaine de Courteillac, Bx. Sup.

The Holy Grail? Well, not quite, but finding the Bordeaux or Bordeaux Supérieur that knocks your socks off is a labor of love. I had heard that Domaine de Courteillac was worth investigating, so I gave the 2010 vintage a spin.
This 28-hectare estate located in Ruch, 14 km south of Castillon-la-Bataille, is owned by Dominique Meneret, former owner of Château Larmande, a Saint Emilion grand cru classé, and founder of the négociant firm of Ballande & Meneret, which he has since sold.  The grape varieties are 70% Merlot, 20% Cabernet Sauvignon, and 10% Cabernet Franc. The wine is aged in oak: ½ in new barrels, and ½ in barrels used for one previous vintage. Stéphane Derenecourt is consulting enologist.

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The 2010 is very dark and deep in color, more black than red.
The nose is soft and not very expressive, but features cherry-vanilla overtones. Still, it is a bit dumb, with some alcohol showing.
The wine starts out smooth and enveloping on the palate, but then goes into a dry, relatively short aftertaste. There’s a somewhat heavy mouthfeel and the 14.5% alc./vol. makes itself felt.
The grail will have to wait…
Will this wine improve markedly with age? I think not.
Don’t get me wrong: 2010 Domaine de Courteillac was a pleasure to drink with lunch midweek. But I had the impression that M. Meneret was trying a little too hard. The wine’s strength and oak influence are heavy-handed in light of the wine’s intrinsic flavor profile. I think the same wine made in a lighter, more easy-going style would have been more successful. I’ll be interested to tast future vintages of Domaine de Courteillac to see where it’s going.

4 Bordeaux wines with dinner: 2 classified, 2 not

1999 Château Haut Mayne – I was unfamiliar with this 5-hectare estate in Preignac, but had a bottle of the 99 vintage in the cellar. Friends from Quebec were over to dinner, so I thought I would introduce them to the Bordeaux custom of serving sweet white wine as an aperitif, rather than at the end of the meal with dessert. 1999 was, on the whole, a middling vintage in Sauternes and this wine was certainly not one of the better ones I have encountered…. It was fairly pale and tea-colored, looking older than its age. The nose was fresh, but far more overripe than botrytised. In fact, if served blind, I’d have taken it for a Jurançon, with its pear and gooseberry aromas. Nothing botytritized about it at all. The palate was a let-down to the extent that it started out sweet and luscious, but went nowhere afterward. Definitely your top-heavy, cloying sort Sauternes, without the acidity or touch of bitterness and minerality on the finish to provide balance. Little complexity. Definitely not a success in this vintage. I see that the mix of grape varieties is 90% Sémillon and 10% Sauvignon Blanc. Maybe this needs to be changed to give wine more muscle tone…

2010 Château Chantegrive, Graves blanc, Cuvée Caroline – Chantegrive is a large (nearly 80 hectare) estate located in Podensac in the southern Graves. They make about twice as much red as they do white. They also produce an AOC Cérons.  Chantegrive is a success story achieved by the late Henri Lévêque, a wine broker and well-known Bordeaux personality. The wines are well-distributed in local restaurants and I have many times enjoyed both the red and white wines. This 2010 cuvée prestige white is made from equal parts of Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc. It is straw-yellow in color and has a lemony and slightly medicinal bouquet. On the whole, the nose is rather subdued and a touch smoky. The palate is frankly disappointing to me: angular and acidic. I’ve had better bottles of this and prefer to think that this departure from a proven track record is just a blip.

2004 Château Saint Pierre, Saint Julien – 2004 Bordeaux is receiving much good press at the moment. I decided to open this one up for my guests because is not one of the most commonly found great growths. 2004 Saint Pierre had a very dark core, but the browning rim made it look older than its age.  The nose was redolent of caramel, beeswax on a parquet floor, forest floor (sorry for all the floors…), and understated black fruit. The wine was a little thin and dilute, but had interesting cedar and chocolate overtones and a quality I can only describe as ferrous. Solid rather than exciting and fully ready to drink. I have enjoyed Saint Pierre very much in the past, considering it one of the best values among the crus classés. I fell in love with the 2009 and have a few bottles in the cellar. The 2004 is OK in light of the vintage.

2000 Château d’Issan, Margaux  – I’ve been opening up my lesser and mid-range Bordeaux from the 2000 vintage lately and almost all of them have been ready to go. So, seeing as I had several bottles of the 2000 d’Issan, I figured I would check out how a more up-market wine was doing. The wine had a lovely deep, dark color with medium bricking on the rim. The nose was absolutely lovely, corresponding to that mythical, but elusive feminine Margaux quality one hears cited but actually encounters far less often… Ethereal blackcurrant jelly overtones as well as hints of pencil shavings and truffle. In fact, this is not the first time that I have seen similarities between a Margaux and a fine Pomerol. Anyway, the wine starts out beautifully generous and smooth although it falls down somewhat (tad weak and dilute) on the middle palate. However, it rebounds on the finish with strong tannin. This imparts a little dryness – some of which seems due to oak. So, this 2000 d’Issan is a fine glass of wine, but the balance is not quite there. By the time the tannin evens out, I wonder if that impression of dryness might not increase, and the fruit diminish. Still, this wine has loads of class, and a first class sweet bouquet.

 

INTRODUCTION – SEPTEMBER 2014

I know what you’re thinking: “Oh no, not another Bordeaux wine site, who on earth needs that?”… In reality, though, there are precious few sites focusing on the wines of the Gironde out there! I am assistant manager of one, www.bordeauxwinenthusiasts.com, but Bordeaux is usually just one region out of many.

Bordeaux takes a lot of knocks these days. A “fox and the grapes syndrome” has set in. The price increases in the great growths over the past few years have made them unattainable for many consumers – so it has become trendy to say that the wines are not worth it, that Bordeaux is “old hat”, and that is best left to the likes of stockbrokers and the decrepit bourgeoisie! Of course, it is also claimed that “modern” Bordeaux is over-extracted, over-oaked, Parkerized, and not nearly as good as it once was…

The fact is that I’m as put off as anyone by the recent price increases of the crus classés. But these wines represent only 5% of Bordeaux! Of the remaining 95%, to be fair, there is a certain amount of dross: thin weedy wines selling at bargain basement prices. But there are also numerous gems and a full spectrum of terroirs and styles

The media love to discover and highlight estates in the Lubéron or the Languedoc or the Loire Valley, but rarely enthuse about non-classified growths from Bordeaux. Despite the region’s 9,000 châteaux, Bordeaux is perceived as a known entity, so journalists don’t often go there – except to see the famous names…

The main purpose of my blog is to write about these lower-profile estates, to give a face to châteaux eclipsed by the high and mighty.
Based in Bordeaux, I also intend to write about what it’s like to visit and live here, to speak about the people behind the labels, and in my own little way to breathe new life into Bordeaux’s somewhat fossilized image.

Château Haut Macô, Côtes de Bourg

All of us have certain “go to” wines – reasonably priced, dependable, that don’t need to age forever –  the kind of wine you can open up mid-week and that will make you glad to be alive. Simple and enjoyable, just what it should be. Haut-Macô is one such wine…
The 50 hectare estate in Tauriac (Côtes de Bourg) is owned and managed by brother and sister Anne and Hugues Mallet, the 4th generation of their family at the estate. Their father, Bernard, was one of the movers and shakers in the appellation, which has had to contend with somewhat of an image problem. That’s because many people put Bourg wines on the same plane as AOC Bordeaux when, in fact, they can be significantly better.
There has not been any white wine produced at Haut-Macô for years. The red is produced from 60% Merlot, 27% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Cabernet Franc, and 3% Malbec.

I met Anne Mallet on a sunny August morning and we tasted through recent vintages. I had bought some of the 2009 two years ago and it did well in the line-up running from 2009 to 2012. However, I liked the 2010 even better because of the quality of the tannin and greater ageing potential.
The château also makes a Cuvée Jean-Bernard (combining the names of two brothers from the preceding generation). As much as I like the regular cuvee, I found the Jean-Bernard to be somewhat dry and oaky on the aftertaste. The 2009 cuvée Jean-Bernard was nevertheless the best of the bunch, and promising.

You often hear that Bordeaux has become too expensive. Well, I have the invoice right in front of me. I purchased 6 bottles of 2010 Haut-Macô for 37.08 euros. At that price, and for this sort of quality, I think Bordeaux can hold its own against wines from anywhere else in the world.
And that’s one the main reasons why I started this blog.