Château Barde-Haut: Tasting & Drinking
The variety of styles available within the St Emilion appellation is many and varied. We have different terroirs, sand, gravel, limestone and clay (and blends thereof) and different varieties, with some châteaux increasingly featuring Cabernet Franc, while others stick with the traditional Merlot-dominated assemblage. I think the most striking variation, however, comes from the approach of the winemaker, in terms of ripeness at picking, the philosophy when it comes to extraction, and so on. Wines made with a focus on extreme ripeness, with a longer hang-time on the vine, and then perhaps with longer or more concerted extraction, give us St Emilion in the modern style; dark, with less well-defined, somewhat fuzzy-fruit flavours, sometimes with more tannin or alcohol than we expected.
Château Barde-Haut falls very much into this modern camp. The wines are clearly made with considerable dedication, and the current proprietors have succeeded in lifting the estate up from a sea of overlooked mediocrity (and there are plenty of dilute examples of this style out here to the east of St Emilion) to a wine that, at the very least, has been noticed.
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