Bordeaux 2017 at Two Years: St Emilion Grand Cru Classé & Grand Cru
Moving on from my report on the top tier wines of the St Emilion appellation in this vintage, the 2017 St Emilion Premier Grand Cru Classé labels, in this second report from St Emilion I turn my attention to all the other wines, from those which enjoy the grand cru classé ranking to those with no special status at all. As a consequence this report takes in estates of all standing, some of the names below very well known, some a little less so.
More important than classification, however, is terroir. The two are of course related, although the correlation is weak; there are well-ranked estates on the more sandy and occasionally gravelly soils that surround the vineyards of Château Cheval Blanc and Château Figeac, terroir which you might otherwise think incompatible with such a standing, and there vineyards are on the hallowed clay and limestone soils of the plateau which, for various reasons, have no position within the local classification at all. Just as variation within the region’s many appellations is generally too great to recommend buying wines on this basis, so too it is with classifications. This is a vintage where quality depends mostly on terroir and topography, and perhaps in some cases also on how much money, time and effort could be thrown at sorting good fruit from bad, which explains why estates such as the two mentioned above, the vineyards having been washed with freezing air as it rolled down off the Pomerol plateau, have produced such good wines when the frosty odds seemed to be so heavily stacked against them.
The Wines
It seems only sensible to look first to those estates which enjoy an advantageous position, high on the limestone plateau, those which were most likely to have escaped any great damage during the spring frost. These estates include a number of the single-vineyard wines from Jonathon Maltus, which I tasted at Château Teyssier with the winemaker Neal Whyte (pictured). The 2017 Les Astéries, with its typically minerally scents and substance, was one of the stronger wines here, these features offset by a curranty fruit concentration and floral scents. Both the 2017 Le Dôme and 2017 Vieux Château Mazerat, both from vineyards which lie downslope from higher points of the plateau, close to Château Angélus, also showed exceptionally well.
