St.-Emilion Enters the 21st Century

The Best of Bruce Schoenfeld

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Once every decade, meaning two-and-a-half times less frequent than a U.S. presidential election or a soccer World Cup, the governing body of Bordeaux’s St.-Emilion appellation reviews its classification of top properties. This is more often than the classification of Bordeaux’s Left Bank properties gets altered, which is once in its 201-year history, but it’s still not exactly a frequent occurrence. It happened last (September).

Before the Internet, it could take days for news to arrive about the various promotions and relegations. When Chateau Angelus and Chateau Beau-Sejour Becot gained Premier Grand Cru Classe status in 1996, I scoured newspapers for a week before finally calling France for an update.

This time, it arrived in the form of a morning e-mail from the St.-Emilion press officer. As expected, a handful of properties were added to the list of Grand Cru estates, and a few – most notably Chateau Cadet Bon, which had been demoted in 1986 and promoted again in 1996 – were dropped. But the more important move, the one that ultimately means Euros in the bank, is the promotion from Grand Cru Classe to Premier Grand Cru Classe. As many as four properties were considered possibilities. Two were actually chosen by the St.-Emilion panel.

As of last week, Chateau Troplong Mondot and Chateau Pavie Macquin join 13 other producers on St.-Emilion’s top rung. (Actually, even the top is further divided into Premier Grand Cru Classe A, which is only Cheval Blanc and Ausone, and Premier Grand Cru Classe B, which is everyone else. But all 15 will participate equally in Premier Grand Cru Classe events, such as the formal dinner held in conjunction with the VinExpo wine fair every second June.)

I agree with both promotions. Impeccably run by Christine Valette, who renovated the entire property after taking control in 1981 and brought on Michel Rolland – and, later, Stephane Derenoncourt – to supervise the winemaking, Troplong-Mondot has been producing top-quality wines for years. I’m especially a fan of the gorgeous 2002, which wasn’t a headline vintage in St.-Emilion but rewarded careful, restrained winemaking. And by all accounts, the 2005 is remarkable.

Unlike Chateau Pavie and Chateau Pavie-Decesse, Nicolas Thienpont’s Pavie-Macquin is not owned by the controversial (and wildly successful) supermarket magnate Gerard Perse, but its wines exhibit the same full-throttle style. This is a wine I like to buy in vintages that aren’t especially ripe, such as 1999 and 2004, though I’ve also very much enjoyed the 1995.

Fifteen is a large number of wineries for a top classification. Unfortunately, St.-Emilion is a close-knit village, and nobody wants to offend a neighbor. So promoting properties to the Premier Grand Cru Classe level is far easier than dropping them.

To me, Chateau La Gaffeliere (not to be confused with the hard-charging Canon-La Gaffeliere) and Chateau Trottevieille have been under-performing for years. It’s all personal taste, of course, but a demotion to Grand Cru might have been the jolt that inspired them to a renewed push for quality. That’s what revisiting a classification is for, after all.

It didn’t happen this time for Chateau Trottevieille in St.-Emilion. Perhaps 2016?

 

Eben Sadie’s Mission

Bruce Schoenfeld in Swartland, South Africa

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Every once in a while, I come across a winemaker with such confidence in his convictions, such philosophical purity to his techniques, that he’s capable of singlehandedly altering the mindset of his appellation.

Eben Sadie of South Africa’s Sadie Family Wines doesn’t have the renown of the Rhone’s Michel Chapoutier, or Burgundy’s Dominique Lafon, or California’s Helen Turley. But he’s every bit as certain as they are that he’s making wine as it should be made.

It’s hard to argue with him. In this viticultural pocket about 20 miles north of Paarl, Sadie is crafting the most compelling wine from South Africa I’ve ever tasted. There are only three of them, a Rhone-blend white (Palladius) and two Syrah-based reds (Columella and Sequillo), and all are made in small quantities (though there’s twice as much Sequillo, the product of a joint venture with a South African millionaire, as the others.)

Almost nobody I know, even in South Africa, has ever had them. But word is spreading.

Traveling through the Cape winelands after visiting Sadie and tasting through the line, I was quizzed on Sadie’s ways of working. Is it true he doesn’t irrigate? What about his plans to make wine in buried amphora, like the ancient Greeks? Is his Columella wine really that good?

Sadie also owns a winery, called Dits del Terra, in Spain’s similarly arid Priorat region. I haven’t sampled those wines yet – I hope to this summer – but the way he talks about them makes it evident that they’re a product of the same intense vision.

It’s the only way he knows how to work.

Sadie traveled the world for several years, living in France and Germany, Austria and Italy, Spain and Oregon, immersing himself in the winemaking culture of each country. He helped gain acclaim for the Spice Route brand as a young winemaker, but has moved away from that fruit-forward style. “When you’re 24, you want to show the world how good you are,” he says. “The wines start to taste like your ambition.”

Now 34, his company in Swartland consists of himself, his brother, and his sister. Its entire business is capturing the terroir of these jagged hills of the Western Cape in a bottle. Consistency, that staple of brand-building, doesn’t interest him, and with wines made a few hundred cases at a time, it doesn’t have to. “The problem with the New World is the obsession with perfection,” he says. “There’s no such thing as perfection. It’s all imperfection.”

Almost alone among the area’s viticulturists, Sadie refuses to mitigate the intensity of a South African summer by irrigating. “It alters the climate,” he explains. “I want the vintage to announce itself in my wine. I want it to speak of fortune, misfortune, whatever the case may be.”
By doing so, he makes the suave consistency of most wines seem simplistic by comparison. His 2004 Columella has the core of black fruit typical of Swartland Syrah (Shiraz), but a bracing layer of red fruit plays rhythm guitar to the bass of the cassis and plum. One hundred of the four hundred cases have come to the United States, imported by European Cellars’ Eric Solomon. They’re worth every bit of the $70 price.

A barrel sample of the 2005 shows off an utterly different South Africa wine. Powerful but not overbearing, with a Rhone meatiness to the Syrah (Shiraz), but utterly limpid in a way that I wish more Hermitage could be, it could well evolve into the most interesting wine South Africa has produced.

Such wines aren’t made from marketing plans or focus groups, or even the desire to please your customers. It takes an almost religious certitude in your methods, and the sense that no other way forward is possible. Agree with the winemaker or disagree, you can’t help but taste that certitude in the wine.

 

Our Collector’s Guide to South Africa

Bruce Schoenfeld in Stellenbosch, South Africa

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The first time I met the Namibian-born enologist Martin Meinert, nearly a decade ago, he’d embarked on a wine project as quixotic as any I’d ever come across. In celebration of the coming millennium change, he’d been hired to blend the contributions of 100 different South African winemakers into a single, coherent wine.

The result, predictably enough, was a South African blend lacking in personality, singularity, evident terroir, and just about any other attribute that might possibly make a wine interesting. “One of the worst experiences of my life,” Meinert calls it now.

But Meinert, who cut his teeth in the 1990s as winemaker for the formidable South African estate Vergelegen, has come back strong. His own Meinert Wines, produced in small quantities in Stellenbosch’s Devon Valley, are well-made blends and varietals utilizing Bordeaux grapes. He also makes a commendable Viognier for the new Eagles Nest Farm in Constantia, with Shiraz to come.

Beyond that, he’s a partner – along with winemaker Ken Forrester and two others – in the ambitious 96 Winery Road restaurant outside Stellenbosch, which has emerged as the meeting place for the South African wine community. And he’s a fierce advocate and one-man public relations campaigner for the wines of friends such as Forrester, Peter Finlayson and David Trafford, some of the brightest lights in the industry here.

When I passed through Stellenbosch in December, Meinert and I sat down to taste at 96 Winery Road. He not only brought along Trafford, but insisted that his de Trafford wines take center stage. I’d been impressed with the de Trafford Shiraz before, but in the new vintage, the 2004, I tasted an elegance I rarely encounter in South African wine. (I’d certainly classify it more a Syrah than a Shiraz in stylistic terms.)

Trafford made only 230 cases of it, and importer Bryce McNamee has been able to procure just 49 for the United States, so this won’t be a wine you can find on every doorstep, but it’s unquestionably worth searching for. A rounder, frutier de Trafford Shiraz, called Blueprint and made from a neighboring vineyard, exists in slightly greater quantities.

Trafford’s top-of-the-line wine, Elevation 393, adds Shiraz to a Bordeaux blend. His Cabernet flavors often veer toward vegetal, but here that adds complexity, interest and varietal characteristic. And the Shiraz provides a wild note. It’s not a Napa Valley taste-alike, that’s for sure.

Alongside that, Meinert poured the 2003 version of his own Synchronicity, which uses the same formula as Elevation 393 but subs the native South African grape of Pinotage for Syrah. Even a little Pinotage in a blend is usually too much for me, but I was surprised to find none of that usual back-of-the-palate bite in the Synchronicity. It was a lush, distinctive wine, with 15 percent alcohol yet a nimbleness on the palate. Eight-hundred cases are produced. I consider it Meinert’s finest wine to date – though the 2004, not yet ready to drink, is rumored to be even better.

“Producers like David and me are trying to find distinctiveness, something that’s a little bit different,” Meinert said. He doesn’t need to be reminded how much easier that is when you aren’t blending 100 South African cuvees into a single wine.

 

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