Bordeaux 2015 Primeurs: Moulis & Listrac
It was a few years ago now that I first visited Château Clarke in Listrac for a tasting, during the primeurs. At the time I marvelled at the sheer expanse of the domaine. I drove for what seemed like mile after mile along the periphery of the estate, wondering if I would ever gain access to it, and the tasting within. Every potential entranceway I encountered was sealed with a tall cast-iron gate. The thought did cross my mind that I could just drive through the vines, but such ideas were soon banished when I saw the depth of the ditch than lay between the road and the vines. If this were an episode of the A-Team my hire car, with all the buzz provided by its 22 wasp-power engine, would have made it across no problem. But this was reality, and I was quite certain that any such attempt at stunt driving would have resulted in the car ending up deeply embedded, nose first, in the ditch. A bit like that camping trip I went on in 1989. But, ahem, that’s surely a story for another time.
In the end I found my way in. Today, reflecting on the sheer scale of the estate, two things come to mind regarding its size and what benefits this might bring. First, there is the seclusion, especially valuable perhaps if you’re a member of the Rothschild family, and you don’t want any nosey neighbours (or cousins?) poking around your estate. Second, there is the simple economics of it all. Here in Listrac (and the same applies to Moulis) the average price of a bottle is a tiny fraction of what similar-looking bottles of wine with labels bearing magical words such as Pauillac or Pomerol, for example, might fetch.
It’s easy enough farming just a hectare or two if you sell your wines for the price of Le Pin or Château Lafleur, but those are wines very much at the upper end of the Bordeaux pricing spectrum. Here in Listrac, volume perhaps counts for something. If you’re selling for €8 per bottle, then you have a very slim margin, and you really need to be selling hundreds of thousands of bottles every year, not a few hundred, to remain profitable. These thoughts touch on one of the great paradoxes of modern Bordeaux, as it is not just the backwaters of the region such as Moulis and Listrac that enjoy the economies and benefits of scale.
