Château La Voûte
If you could travel back in time a little more than two decades to interview your favourite critic, to ask them what was hot in Bordeaux – in St Emilion in particular – at that moment, it wouldn’t be too long before a now half-forgotten word tumbled from their lips.
Garagiste.
The unwitting instigator of the garagiste movement was Jean-Luc Thunevin who, in 1991, produced the very first vintage of a new micro-cuvée, Château Valandraud. The term garagiste was a reference to the fact Jean-Luc made his wine in a backstreet garage, nestled among the cobbled streets of St Emilion, but it also came to embody a style, one of colour, density, extraction and oak. The wines were immensely popular with influential critics, and before long the roll-call of wines made in the garagiste style (if not always in a garage) – Rol Valentin, La Gomerie, Le Dôme, Gracia, Lynsolence and the like – was as long as a winemaker’s pipette.
These days many in the region have moved on, the garagiste concept perhaps seen as rather passé. Jean-Luc is now no longer the ‘bad boy’ interloper, but a fully ennobled member of the St Emilion aristocracy, Château Valandraud a much expanded (and relocated) property which was promoted directly to the rank of premier grand cru classé in the 2012 iteration of the St Emilion classification.
Nevertheless, Jean-Luc is again at the centre of another (thus far, largely unappreciated) development in Bordeaux, which is the revitalisation of St Emilion’s eastern plateau. Château Valandraud now typifies the cool, dark and deliciously modern style coming out of this corner of St Emilion, and he leads – unofficially, of course – a new roll call of increasingly successful names some of which were almost unknown only a decade ago (I provide more detail on this on the next page of this profile).
Today, any roll call of eastern plateau estates would be incomplete without mention of Château La Voûte, which is located just across the road from the modern-day Château Valandraud. With just over 2 hectares of vines, the yields from this tiny property are so small the wine could be made in a garage, although I doubt anybody would mistake the rather swish roadside cellars which sprang up here a few years ago for a mere garage.
