It’s Only Laroque ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It): Château Laroque 2000 – 2022
It is June 2014. The Rolling Stones are in the midst of their 14 on Fire tour, with June dates in the stadiums of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Dusseldorf, Rome and Madrid (just a few cosy and intimate venues, then). Opening with Start Me Up, they quickly slip into the ever-popular It’s Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It), a portal to a twenty-song set culminating in You Can’t Always Get What You Want and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. The tour was an unqualified sell-out success, the takings totalling more than $165 million.
That same June, while I would perhaps rather be watching Jagger’s licentious lips and hypnotic hips gyrating in strange synchrony on the stages of Europe, I find myself in Bordeaux (so what’s new?), my own 2014 tour taking in an eclectic mix of appellations and vineyards (but no 70,000-seat stadiums). My set list starts with a couple of properties in Pessac-Léognan, before a diversion to the Médoc, and then on to Pomerol. As the trip nears an end, I finish up with a couple of visits in St Emilion.
It is always good to finish on a couple of classics (ask Jagger), and one or two of my final visits I already know quite well; Château La Gaffelière, for example, where I taste the latest vintages with proprietor Comte Alexandre de Malet-Roquefort. Meeting him allows me to increase the number of counts I know (my count-count?) by one, to a total of three, a figure which remains unchanged more than ten years later. The other two, should you be interested, are Comte Stephan von Neipperg, of Château Canon-la-Gaffelière, and the most famous count of all, Count von Count, of Sesame Street.
One or two properties I visit were, however, less familiar. One among them was Château Laroque.
On arrival at Château Laroque I am immediately and entirely seduced by the château, a fascinating blend of feudal and Renaissance architecture, the likes of which I can recall seeing at only one other location, the somewhat more grandiose Château Villandry, one of the most historic of the Loire Valley’s many grand châteaux.
At one end of the Laroque property there stands a robust circular tower, clearly built at a time when security was bought with thick foundations and high walls. Near its summit there is a ring of decorative corbels, the whole capped by a low dome of rough tiles. It is all that remains of a great fortress that once stood here; its construction began during the 12th century, its not-quite-complete destruction coming four hundred years later, during the French Wars of Religion. Today it is the oldest building – or part-building – in the commune of Saint-Christophe-des-Bardes, the eastern section of St Emilion’s limestone plateau.
But that is not all there is to Château Laroque. Attached to the south side of this great tower there sits a later addition; an elegant two-storied, many-windowed château in the style of Louis XIV (1638 – 1715); if you could lift a section of Versailles, and deposit it on St Emilion’s eastern plateau, this is perhaps what it would look like. The admittedly rather plain garden of gravel and grass is compensated for by row upon row of stone balusters and elegant statues, while inside the building is filled with huge marble fireplaces, gigantic mirrors and gilt-framed tapestries, all watched over by the portraits of long-deceased proprietors, the noble Rochefort-Lavie family.
