Bordeaux 2021 at Two Years: Margaux
I read somewhere that travel broadens the mind. I also read that it can loosen the bowels, but let’s stick with the more cerebral of these developments for the moment.
Sitting in the tasting room at Château Brane-Cantenac, I could certainly feel my mind expanding. Partly this was because, even though I first called in on this estate back in 2011 when I toured the vines and tasted with technical director Christophe Capdeville, it is only in recent years that I have been visiting regularly, during the course of the primeurs or my in-bottle tastings, in order to add fresh notes to my reports. In truth it is one of a number of châteaux in St Estèphe, Pauillac, St Julien and Margaux which I have added to my post-Covid-era tasting schedule in order to make my reports as comprehensive as possible. Visiting regularly brings one distinct advantage; it means I get to taste not only the grand vin, but also the terroir-specific Baron de Brane, the second/third (it depends on how precise you want to be) wine Margaux de Brane, and the infrequently seen white cuvée, Baron-Cantenac Blanc.
So I taste more wines nowadays, although it was not the roll call of cuvées I found mind-bending. It was more Henri Lurton’s description of the origins of the fruit for each cuvée, made with the help of a wall-mounted digital screen displaying vividly coloured topographical maps depicting every slope, undulation and furrow of the multifaceted Brane-Cantenac vineyard. And the fact that, like many in Bordeaux, talk of mere Günzian gravel is now outdated, usurped by more specific reference to the various gravel terraces of the Médoc.
Forty minutes later I left with four freshly scribbled tasting notes (well, stored in a file on my laptop – Henri Lurton isn’t the only guy with a ‘digital screen’, I’ll have you know) and a commitment to refresh my guide to the terroirs of Bordeaux, and specifically the various terraces of the Médoc peninsula (an update, looking at the increasingly extensive nature of my Loire Valley wine guide, which is long overdue).
