Grape & Grain | Why it’s hard to know what you’re getting in a bottle of Saint-Émilion
Producers on Bordeaux’s Right Bank have always been innovators, but the sharply contrasting styles of wine they produce can be confusing. It’s a mystery why more of them don’t let their wines express the brilliance of the limestone-clay soil the region’s grapes are grown in
I’m going to start the New Year with a confession. I live in Bordeaux, and spend a good proportion of my professional life tasting the area’s wines, visiting the chateaux and trying to understand the stories and the psychology behind the people who make them. And yet there is oneappellation that confuses me time and again.
It’s the very beautiful and highly coveted Right Bank spot of Saint-Émilion. The merlot and cabernet franc wines from these limestone hills have been sought after since Roman times, typically more fruit-forward and feminine than Bordeaux’s Left Bank counterpoint, the Médoc.
Saint-Émilion has been the site of innumerable innovations, from France’s first regional winegrowing syndicate in 1884 to the first cooperative cellar in 1931 to a consumer-friendly classification system for its wine dating from the 1950s that is renewed every 10 years. And yet I often sit in front of these wines and wonder what they are trying to say today.
Never mind the confusion surrounding the classification that is in danger of becoming better known for its lawsuits than its grands crus classés wines. The bigger question for me is why there continues to be such a sharp contrast between the wine styles, even at the highest level.
Saint-Émilion was famously the epicentre of the “garage wine” movement in the late 1990s, where small producers kept their crop levels low to tease out concentrated flavours from a reduced number of grapes, left the grapes on the vinesfor as much “hang time” as possible, and lavished plenty of new oak during the ageing process to ensure a rich, round and toasty character in the final glass.
These wines found a ready audience, and yet employed techniques that masked rather than revealed the terroir, and in many cases have not aged well. The reason behind this is simple – after a certain level of ripeness, regional character and varietal personality of grapes becomes less easy to distinguish, and too much new oak gives a vanilla taste that can smother the more subtle flavours.
You’ll find it tough to find any producer today who will admit to still looking for this highly concentrated and often highly alcohol-rich style of wine, and yet it seems to me that the producers in Saint-Émilion who are really seeking out the best expression of their brilliant soils – a mix of limestone and clay that should give wines not only silky smoothness but purity of flavour – are still not getting the recognition and appreciation that they deserve.