The Wines of Vignobles Jalousie Beaulieu, 2022
After yesterday’s foray into uncharted territory in Vouvray (expect more of that to come in the future), today I do the same in Bordeaux.
Head to the right bank and the chances are you will end up in St Emilion, hardly surprising given that the town draws in visitors as fruit flies are drawn into the cellars at harvest time, and the vineyards sprawl out over 5,000 hectares of land. Even so, take a different fork in the road and you could easily end up in Pomerol instead, with its towering church spire (apparently not the inspiration for the Tower of Babel, but it could have been) and its great slope of vines on their clay (at the top), gravel (lower down) and sandy (lower still) soils. And if you are keen to explore less familiar ground, you could even head a little further along the riverbank, to call in on Fronsac.
Travel beyond these well-known appellations, however, and you will find swathes of vineyards and domaines with no such prestigious appellations. Here fourth- and fifth-generation vignerons tend small domaines, not infrequently run on a shoestring, often operating out of tiny farmhouses and equally diminutive cellars. Perhaps this is what Pomerol looked like a hundred years ago, before the money started rolling in?
One such domaine is run by the Person family, who run Château Jalousie Beaulieu and Château Pascaud under the umbrella of Vignobles Jalousie Beaulieu. Thanks to Pierre Person (the fifth generation, if you’re asking) I was recently able to taste through some of the family’s most recent releases.
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