Judgment of Paris Page 25

  Maison Joseph Drouhin produces wines from some eighty differentappellations in Burgundy, including Chambertin, Corton, Bâtard-Montrachet, and Grands Echézeaux. The Drouhin Clos des Mouches is a highly revered Burgundy First Growth. British writer Clive Coates wrote that Drouhin wines are “lighter in color than some, and may seem, to the uninitiated, at first somewhat lighter on the palate. Delicate is the word used, and feminine. But this is deceptive. Underneath there is a lot of intensity. Above all there is great integrity ofterroir .”

  Meursault Charmes Roulot, 1973

  On his visit to Burgundy in 1787, Jefferson noted: “They only make white wines in Meursault, because it’s too rocky for reds.” Jefferson also reported that Burgundy’s white wine producers ate inexpensive dark bread, while the wealthier red-wine producers could afford the more costly white bread. Today, however, the prices of some Meursault whites approach those of Burgundy’s famous reds.

  Meursault turns out the largest quantity of white Burgundies, with one-third of all the white wines of the Côte d’Or coming from the 900 acres of Meursault. There are seventeen First Growth wines among them, but none of the higher-rated Grand Cru. Among the Meursault First Growths, those of Perrières, Clos des Perrières, Charmes, and Goutte d’Or (Thomas Jefferson’s favorite) are considered the best.

  The origin of the name Meursault is uncertain. Some historians say it comes from the Latinmuris saltus (the rat’s leap) or the Frenchmurs hauts (high walls). Another guess is that it comes from the Frenchsaule marsault (willow tree) since many willows once grew in the area.

  While the vineyards in Meursault date back to the eleventh century, Domaine Guy Roulot is younger than some California wineries. The family has been in the town of Meursault since 1830, but Guy Roulot’s ancestors were modest grape growers. He married into another Burgundy wine family and expanded Domaine Guy Roulot during the 1950s by buying several parcels of vineyards and adding them to those his wife had inherited, for a total of thirty acres.

  Guy Roulot was a low-keyed producer who avoided the limelight and let his wines speak for him. In the 1960s he was still selling inexpensive rosé wine in barrels to the Troisgros restaurant, a Michelin three-star eatery in nearby Roanne, but soon he was producing some of Burgundy’s leading wines. A pioneer, Roulot gave vineyard names to some of his lesser properties and began producing on them First Growth quality wines. Among his most prized possessions were a small section of Meursault Les Perrières and about a half acre of Meursault Les Charmes. He also cleared an abandoned field and planted the highly regarded Meursault Les Tessons vineyard. Wine from Roulot’s properties was considered among the very best white Burgundies.

  Soil in the Charmes vineyard is stony limestone and clay debris. The wine’s defining feature was its intense flavor that came from vines about seventy-five years old that produced small grape clusters and small berries. The Charmes was held for a relatively short eleven months in oak. It was a classic Meursault that was a little more full-bodied and richer than a Chassagne-Montrachet or a Puligny-Montrachet.

  Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles Domaine Leflaive, 1972

  The village of Puligny-Montrachet is considered by many to produce the world’s greatest white wines. The Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles vineyard is a First Growth from the Côte de Beaune section of Burgundy. The 513-acre vineyards of Puligny-Montrachet are planted on gently sloping land facing east, at an altitude of between 759 and 957 feet. To the east of the town and covering a scant seventeen acres is the small vineyard known as Les Pucelles. Its limestone and chalky soil is stony and well drained. It is directly north of five Great Growth vineyards and the proximity shows. Wine writer Hugh Johnson calls it one of the “superior First Growths.”

  The name Leflaive in Burgundy can be traced back to Marc LeFlayve in 1580, who lived at Gissey, near Beaune. Domaine Leflaive was founded in 1717, when Claude Leflaive married a girl from Puligny, planted vineyards, and settled down in the stone house that still serves as the family firm’s headquarters.

  Because of French inheritance laws, the vineyards were gradually divided up among several generations of children, and when Joseph Leflaive (1870–1953) inherited his share in 1905, he got less than five acres. Joseph was a maritime engineer by training and helped design France’s first submarine. His real love, though, was wine, and he gradually built up his vineyard holdings, taking advantage of the post-phylloxera bad times when many landowners were anxious to sell. Wherever he found lesser Aligoté and Gamay vines growing, Leflaive replanted the area with Chardonnay. He bought parcels of land in Chevalier-Montrachet, Bâtard-Montrachet, Les Pucelles, and Les Clavoillons. He also acquired nearly seven acres of Les Pucelles, a huge amount of land by Burgundy standards. By 1926, his holdings had increased to more than sixty acres, and Joseph gave up his engineering business and devoted himself entirely to wine.

  Joseph’s four children, Anne, Jeanne, Vincent, and Joseph, inherited Domaine Leflaive in 1953 upon their father’s death and decided to keep the property intact and manage it jointly. Vincent made the wines, while Joseph handled business matters. Vincent is generally credited with turning the Domaine Leflaive into one of the best white Burgundy producers. He used to say that he sought “elegance and harmony” in his wines, while avoiding high alcoholic levels. Britain’s Clive Coates thought that Pucelles in the Leflaive hands should be ranked a Great Growth, calling it “a ballerina of a wine, with enormous elegance, great depth and magnificent fruit.”

  Cabernet Sauvignon

  Château Haut-Brion, 1970

  Château Haut-Brion was founded in the fifteenth century and is the second-oldest Bordeaux château after its neighbor Château Pape Clément, which dates to 1299. One of the four original Premier Cru Classé or First Growths, Château Haut-Brion was the only wine from the Graves district included in the 1855 classification. The others were from the Médoc. The red-wine vineyards of Château Haut-Brion cover 107 acres located in the suburban Bordeaux town of Pessac. The winery also makes a small amount of white wine. The soil is deep gravel, hence the name Graves. The vineyards are planted with 47 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 43 percent Merlot, and 10 percent Cabernet Franc, which is substantially more Merlot than the other red wines in the competition. Winemakers vary the composition of their blends from year to year depending on the quality of the harvest, but the size of plantings is a good rule of thumb for the amount of each grape used.

  The famous estate’s history begins with the conclusion of the Hundred Years War in 1453. Arnaud de Pontac, a Bordeaux wine merchant, founded the family fortune during the fifteenth century. His son Jean de Pontac married Jeanne de Bellon, whose dowry included a part of the land that would become Haut-Brion. He enlarged the vineyards of Haut-Brion by buying parcels of the surrounding land, and in 1550 began construction of the property’s château. François-Auguste de Pontac (1636–1694) was the last Pontac to own Haut-Brion through direct inheritance.

  The estate’s wine was originally known under the family name Pontac, and the first written mention of it as Haut-Brion is found in the writings of the English diarist Samuel Pepys in 1663. Château Haut-Brion then, as now, was a favorite with the British, as with Thomas Jefferson who visited it in 1787 and sent some home from the 1784 vintage, calling it “the very best Bordeaux wine.”

  The childless François-Auguste de Pontac lived a life so flamboyant and careless that the château was twice repossessed and then passed to various extended-family members. Throughout the eighteenth century Haut-Brion was one of France’s most highly regarded wines. But after the French Revolution, the owner Joseph de Fumel was arrested and guillotined, as were the owners of the three other châteaux that were to become First Growths in 1855.

  Napoléon’s minister of foreign affairs, Talleyrand, bought Haut-Brion in 1801, but sold it three years later. Joseph-Eugène Larrieu acquired the château at auction in 1836 and brought in new technology. The château, though, fell into decline starting with the phylloxera epidemic in the late nineteen
th century and was taken over by the Banque d’Algerie in 1923. The owner of the rundown property offered it to the city of Bordeaux in 1934, on the condition that the town fathers promise to maintain it intact forever.

  After negotiations for that failed, Clarence Dillon, a Francophile American financier, bought Haut-Brion in 1935 for $2.3 million. Dillon restored both the château and the vineyard. The property is still owned by the extended Dillon family, and Dillons make up seven of the eight board members that control the estate. The property and its wines, though, are very much French.

  Château Léoville-Las-Cases, 1971

  Château Léoville-Las-Cases is a Second Growth wine from St.-Julien, which lies along the western bank of the Gironde River just south of Pauillac. The soil is composed of deep, sandy, gravelly dunes.

  St.-Julien is the smallest of the Médoc communes, with only 2,250 acres of vineyards, but it nonetheless has eleven classified wines. In style the wines of St.-Julien are a middle ground between the elegant wines of Margaux and the powerful ones of Pauillac. Léoville-Las-Cases is generally considered the best wine of St.-Julien, and among the best of the Médoc. Many wine connoisseurs consider it the equivalent of a First Growth, and it has often been called the “Latour of St.-Julien.”

  The Château Léoville-Las-Cases vineyards cover 240 acres, part of which are picturesquely walled. The centerpiece is an arched-stone gate, topped by a reclining lion, which appears on the wine’s label. The vineyards are planted with 65 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 19 percent Merlot, 13 percent Cabernet Franc, and 3 percent Petit Verdot. The château used somewhat less Cabernet Sauvignon in its wine than its Médoc counterparts, adding only a little Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot for finesse and color.

  In the mid-eighteenth century, Léoville-Las-Cases was part of a much larger estate that belonged to Blaise Alexandre de Gasq, the ruler of Léoville, who had acquired the vineyards by marriage. In the 1820s, the estate was divided into three separate domains: the largest parcel went to Jean de Las-Cases; the second was bought by the Irish wine merchant Hugh Barton, whose descendants still run Château Léoville-Barton; and the third section went to the Baron de Poyferré when he married Jean de Las-Cases’s daughter, creating Château Léoville-Poyferré. All three wines were classified as Second Growths in 1855.

  In 1900, the Marquis Las Cases sold the property to a company that appointed Théophile Skawinski, a renowned winemaker, as manager, and his descendants remained in charge of winemaking for decades. Starting in the 1920s, the Léoville-Las-Cases vineyards fell into decline, but a new owner, Michel Delon, took over the property in 1950. He brought in as a consultant Émile Peynaud, the eminent professor of enology at the University of Bordeaux. Peynaud urged Léoville-Las-Cases winemakers to increase the length of fermentation and use more new oak barrels for aging. He also had Delon replant vines that were long past their prime.

  Château Montrose, 1970

  Château Montrose is a Second Growth in the 1855 ranking and comes from St.-Estèphe, the northernmost of the great Médoc communes. St.-Estèphe’s heavy soil has less gravel and more clay, which results in slower drainage than elsewhere in the region. Since the vineyards are a little farther north where it is slightly cooler, the grapes, particularly Cabernet Sauvignon, ripen more slowly. St.-Estèphe wines are generally more full-bodied than other Médocs. They also have more acidity and more intense flavors, but somewhat less aroma. The 1970 Montrose in the Paris Tasting was considered one of the half dozen best vintages of the previous quarter century.

  The vineyards of Château Montrose are in a single contiguous expanse that overlooks the Gironde River, sloping from a gravelly ridge right down to a highway that flanks the river bank, just northeast of Château Cos d’Estournel, another Second Growth. The nineteenth-century château is surrounded by workers’ housing and winery buildings, forming a small village, with a row of palm trees testifying to the mild climate.

  The soil in Montrose’s 168 acres is made up of gravel mixed with black sand over a subsoil of clay and marl. The vineyards are planted with 65 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 25 percent Merlot, and 10 percent Cabernet Franc. Montrose wines generally take a long time to develop.

  On March 6, 1778, Etienne Théodore Dumoulin bought the land on which Château Montrose was later planted. The property was then covered with bushes, reeds, and heather, whose rosy-pink blossoms gave the château its name, Montrose—rose hill. Dumoulin’s son, who was also called Etienne Théodore, planted the vineyards in 1815, then built the winery, and started constructing the château in about 1825. Château Montrose remained in the Dumoulin family until 1866, when Mathieu Dollfus bought it. He enlarged the vineyards and renovated the buildings, but when he died in 1887 his heirs sold the property to Jean Hostein, the owner of Cos d’Estournel. In 1896, Hostein sold Montrose to his son-in-law Louis Charmolüe, who put the Charmolüe family coat of arms on the label, where it still remains. Since then the property has been in the Charmolüe family, run by Louis Charmolüe until 1925, by his son André until 1944, and then by Madame Yvonne Charmolüe until 1960, when Jean-Louis Charmolüe became the master of Château Montrose.

  Château Mouton Rothschild, 1970

  The best known French wine at the Paris Tasting was Château Mouton Rothschild. This was due largely to its owner, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, a wily entrepreneur, marketing wizard, and lover of fast cars. The baron was passionate about art and literature (he translated Elizabethan poets and Christopher Marlowe into French), a high-society playboy in his youth and a notorious ladies’ man until his advanced old age. He was also something of the black sheep of his famed family, and maintained a long-standing quarrel with his neighboring cousins at Château Lafite Rothschild.

  Only three years before the Paris Tasting, Baron Philippe achieved his lifelong goal of having Château Mouton Rothschild reclassified from a Second Growth to a First Growth under the historic Bordeaux classification. It is the only wine to have been reclassified since 1855. The change was due to his persistence, negotiating skills, and financial clout—not to mention the mystique of the Rothschild name.

  The commune of Pauillac stretches along the banks of the Gironde Estuary in the central Médoc, between St.-Estèphe and St.-Julien. Pauillac is the jewel in the Bordeaux crown. Eighteen Pauillac wines are among the 1855 classified wines, and three of the five First Growths come from Pauillac: Château Latour, Château Lafite Rothschild, and Château Mouton Rothschild.

  The vineyards of Château Mouton Rothschild rise on gravelly land that is the highest in the Pauillac area. They cover 203 acres and are planted with 80 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 8 percent Merlot, 10 percent Cabernet Franc, and 2 percent Petit Verdot. The wines are fermented in oak vats for twenty-one to thirty-one days, then aged in mostly new oak barrels for eighteen to twenty-two months. Mouton, in old French, meant either a sheep or a small hill, and referred to the vineyard’s terrain. The flamboyant Baron Philippe for some time appropriately wore muttonchop sideburns.

  Until 1730, Château Mouton, as it was then called, belonged to the Marquis Nicolas-Alexandre de Ségur. In addition to Mouton, he owned two other properties that would later be named First Growths, Château Lafite and Château Latour, as well as the respected Château Calon-Ségur and Château Phélan-Ségur. Not surprisingly, King Louis XV nicknamed Ségur “The Prince of Vines.”

  In the early nineteenth century, Mouton came into the hands of Baron Hector de Brane, another proprietor of large estates in Bordeaux, who renamed it Brane-Mouton. Paris banker Isaac Thuret bought Château Brane-Mouton in 1830 and sold it in 1853 to Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild, a member of the English branch of the family.

  There are many theories about why Château Mouton was classified as a Second Growth, while the other four were ranked First Growths. Perhaps the vineyard’s recent purchase by a nefarious Englishman is explanation enough. In its ruling the classification committee cited, perhaps in its own defense, the “pitiful state” of the vineyard’s buildings.

 
When Nathaniel de Rothschild died in 1870, neither his son James nor his grandson Henri was interested in running the winery, and the property gradually fell into decline. By the end of World War I, Mouton was in shambles. In 1922, though, Henri de Rothschild’s youngest son, Philippe, took over Mouton on his twentieth birthday, and set out to restore it to more than its former glory. In protest to Mouton being considered second rate, Baron Philippe adopted as his estate’s motto a variation of the ancient one used by the princes of Rohan as a sign of their fierce local pride:“Roi ne puis, prince ne daigne, Rohan suis.” (“King I cannot be, I do not deign to be Prince, I am Rohan.”) Mouton’s read:“Premier ne puis, Second ne daigne, Mouton suis.” (“First I cannot be, Second I disdain, I am Mouton.”) After the 1973 reclassification, Baron Philippe changed the estate’s motto to“Premier je suis, Second je fus, Mouton ne change.” (“First I am, Second I was, Mouton does not change.”)

  During his sixty-five-year reign, Baron Philippe made many innovations, including the policy of bottling the wine at the château as a way of guaranteeing authenticity and reducing fraud. This led to the noticemis en bouteille au château (bottled at the château) found today on the corks or labels of many French wines.

  In 1945 Rothschild had a local artist design a specialV for Victory label for that year’s wine. Each year thereafter he commissioned renowned artists to design that vintage’s label. Among the artists who have painted the Mouton Rothschild label are Picasso, Miró, Braque, Chagall, Dalí, Kandinsky, and Warhol.