Bordeaux 2011 Primeurs: Montrose & Other Châteaux
Having tasted at Cos d’Estournel I hot-footed it over to Montrose, St Estèphe’s only other second growth property. As is the case with Cos d’Estournel, Montrose has also seen massive investment in recent years. At Cos Jean-Guillaume Prats has remained the estate’s figurehead despite the Prats family selling up to the Taillan Group (owned by the Merlaut family) who subsequently sold the property to industrialist Michel Reybier (it is easy to forget, with Prats still doing the meeting and greeting at the estate, that it has changed hands twice in the past few years). At Montrose the change in ownership has been more obvious, because part of the revolution instigated by the new owners Martin and Olivier Bouygues was the installation of Jean-Bernard Delmas to over see winemaking. A doyen of the Bordeaux wine world, associated with Haut-Brion for many decades (where his son Jean-Philippe Delmas now runs the show), nothing stamped their authority – and shouted change! – like the installation of Delmas (who is pictured).
The fiche technique for the vintage issued by Château Montrose states that “[t]his year more than ever, the vignerons were forced to truly understand and work with their environment and to adapt their techniques to the very specific climatic conditions which they experienced“. Now it might be slightly flippant of me to say so, but I believe this is a Bordelais euphemism for “it hailed on Thursday, so we started picking on Friday“. Although the area damaged by the hail was much less here than it was at Cos d’Estournel, the picking here was undertaken even more swiftly, with harvesters sent out on September 2nd, the very next day (the Lafite parcel in St Estèphe, by the way, was harvested on September 3rd). Picking finished later here, however, with the final batch of fruit being brought in on September 27th, so although the start was early the finish was perhaps slightly more relaxed, undoubtedly allowing some of the fruit to benefit from 2011’s Indian summer. The overall yield was 35 hl/ha, just shy of that recorded at Cos.
