Bordeaux 2015 Primeurs: Jonathan Maltus
Challenging the supremacy of François Mitjavile on these pages is Jonathan Maltus (pictured). His wines are of a very different style, but they are certainly of comparable quality, and what is more he offers not one or two or three wines, but several times that number. And two of them are of supreme, ‘great vintage’ quality.
“We had a good flowering”, said Jonathan as we sat down to taste his 2015s, “with a hot June and July, weather that suits clay over limestone, followed by the rain in August which we needed. The rain in September was not aggressive in any way. We started picking on September 21st, and stopped on October 15th. The single vineyards we started on October 2nd, with most of the Merlot there coming in between October 2nd and the 6th, and the Cabernet Franc we picked on the 12th and 13th”. Noting that Jonathan picked much of the fruit for his single-vineyard cuvées well into October, I asked if he was troubled by the later rains. “We didn’t have a problem with the rain. I recall employees drove in from Bordeaux to work and reported storms and showers of hail, and yet here in St Emilion it was sunny”.
The portfolio opens with Château Teyssier, a good large-volume cuvée, followed by an impressive Château Laforge, a wine from a blend of all three St Emilion terroirs. It was with the single-vineyard wines that things got really interesting though. First, joining Le Carré and Les Astéries there is a third cuvée from the plateau, Le Pontet. With a moderate depth of clay and softer limestone, this cuvée sits between the other two single-vineyard wines in style, a little more serious than Le Carré but without the intense, smoky minerally character that the calcaire à astéries gives to its namesake wine.
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