Château La Tour Carnet: Tasting & Drinking
We all have our own personal wine journey, a mental scrapbook upon the pages of which we paste memories of bottles, associated occasions, and the people who shared that moment with us. I don’t mind admitting that I have a soft spot for Château La Tour Carnet, an early encounter with the wines of this estate having occurred during a family holiday many years ago. I have to turn back a lot of pages in the mental scrapbook, but the bottle is there. En route to France, with very young children in tow, we decided to break up the journey and stay in a country hotel not far from Stonehenge, which provided an obvious diversion. The hotel, although it sounds grand, was a small family-run affair, and I wasn’t expecting much at dinner. How wrong I was; the meal was delicious, and it was washed down with a bottle of pre-Magrez Château La Tour Carnet, which seemed to my inexperienced palate to have all the qualities I expected to find in a St Julien from next-door, with an elegant poise and balance.
With every bottle of Château La Tour Carnet I come back to today I hope to find some glimmer of that wine, but after many years I came to the conclusion that I would never be able to recapture that moment. For one thing, the style of the wine changed dramatically. After the Magrez takeover it began to mirror the style seen on other Bernard Magrez properties including Pape-Clément and Fombrauge; the new wines were inky dark and rich in fruit that was slightly less well-defined than I would have liked. The wines still had character and freshness, but this was bolstered by – perhaps subsumed by – their velvety textures and weighty substance. Sometimes I thought the wines, pouring rich, opaque and jet black, looked more like engine oil than wine.
In addition there was the issue of the expansion, from perhaps 45 hectares a few decades ago, to double that after Magrez’s acquisition, and then double this again. This gave the property’s critics something else, besides the oily ink-dark nature of the wines, to fret about. Is La Tour Carnet a historic estate, a vineyard the history of which can be traced back through the 1855 Classification of the Médoc and into Medieval times, or is it merely a brand name for a wine from many hundreds of hectares scattered across the Médoc peninsula, sometimes near to the château, sometimes far away? It is a valid question. I would rather it were the former – that would be closer to the origins of that bottle of the 1996 vintage – but the estate today is rather more like the latter.
Happily, things seem to be changing at La Tour Carnet one again.
The most recent of vintages suggest that – in terms of style – that La Tour Carnet is finally turning. Sitting down to taste the 2025 vintage it was clear that the house style chez Magrez – so not only La Tour Carnet, but all the other Magrez estates as well – has evolved. Gone is the inky-dark engine oil of old. These are now wines of fresh red fruits, set within a sinewy and lithe texture, with a more elegant acid-edged frame. These most recent experiences suggest the wines emanating from this particular Bordeaux chai now offer a touch more classicism, and a little less brawn than they once did. I only hope we see the wines continue to develop down these lines in future vintages.
Taking into account what I have written about recent vintages, my preferences when it comes to La Tour Carnet include the fresher 2025 vintage, plus selected years from the engine oil days, particular 2019, 2018 and 2016. There were wines of modest appeal made here between 2020 and 2023, but they did not tantalise my tastebuds in the same manner as these prior vintages. Perhaps this merely reflected the fat I was tiring of the turbo-charged style that ruled here, and which was beginning to feel like Bordeaux from a bygone era.
With this new style, Château La Tour Carnet remains an estate that Bordeaux drinkers should know about. (8/6/07, updated 11/11/15, 14/8/16, 13/8/26)
