Bordeaux 2017 at Two Years: The Rest of The Right
In this concluding look at the right-bank wines of the 2017 vintage, I mop up with all the peripheral appellations beyond St Emilion and Pomerol. It is a fairly limited selection of wines largely limited to those with associations with other châteaux I visited during my time in the region, the wines described here tasted when I called in at Château Pavie, Château Tertre-Roteboeuf, Château Église-Clinet, Château Angélus, Château Lafleur and Château Teyssier where I tasted the Jonathan Maltus portfolio.
Although it is of course not possible to generalise across this great diversity of appellations and their varied terroirs, from the rock-hard limestone of Montagne-St-Emilion to the sandy-gravelly soils of Lalande-de-Pomerol, one thing is clear; some vineyards in these corners of Bordeaux were hit very hard by the frost. Not only were the inland vineyards of the right bank subject to some of the most devastatingly low temperatures in the entire region, many of these domaines and appellations lack the ability to mount the frost response seen in more famous regions.
In a number of cases there simply wasn’t the funds, the time or the manpower to do the necessary work; the Guinaudeau family, for example, focused their efforts on protecting the vines at Château Lafleur, where the loss of crop was minimal, thanks in part at least to their efforts (as well as the vineyard’s position close to the top of the Pomerol slope. In contrast, at their ‘home’ estate in Fronsac, Château Grand Village, the crop was almost entirely wiped out, with production cut to just 10% of normal. Not too far away in Lalande-de-Pomerol the frost was even more destructive, completely wiping out the crop at Château La Fleur de Boüard, which explains this wine’s absence from the list below. Other wines missing from the 2017 line up include Esprit de Pavie, the generic Bordeaux sourced from various right-bank parcels and made by the team at Château Pavie. I am sure others have suffered similarly devastating losses, but beyond the world of the grands crus classés and similarly exalted wines, one simply doesn’t always hear about it.
