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Château d’Agassac 2016

A recurring refrain heard whenever Bordeaux is mentioned – especially in April each year as the leading châteaux release their wines at ever-higher prices – is that Bordeaux is too expensive. And that some sort of price reset is required.

While Bordeaux does provide the billionaires of this world with their daily tipples, the likes of Le Pin, Petrus and Ausone being among some of the world’s most pricy bottles, the idea that Bordeaux as a whole is over-priced seems to me to be false. Indeed, I think the opposite; put the headline-making labels to one side and Bordeaux offers a broad array of wines of quality and consistency at great prices. It is just that to find them we need to look beyond the famous first growths and even old favourites such as Léoville-Barton and Lynch-Bages, and instead look to where the value lies, among the Cru Bourgeois châteaux of the left bank, or the gaggle of good-value wines coming out of St Emilion, its satellites and other unappreciated corners of the region. This is where we find Bordeaux’s affordable quality.

That there is such broad quality across the region is largely down to the advances that have been made in viticulture over the past couple of decades. Soil management has changed; gone is the bare and chemically treated earth of the past, the best vineyards are now grassed over or blanketed with cover crops. Canopy management has evolved, the upper parts grown or trimmed to shade fruit or change the character of the juice.

Perhaps even more significantly, there is a much greater knowledge of vine quality, the value (or otherwise) of different clones and rootstocks, and ensuring vineyards are planted in ways which relate to the terroir, aspect and the direction from which the vines receive the sun. The work in the vineyard is increasingly free of significant chemical inputs, and agroforestry has arrived, even in Bordeaux. The ‘blanket’ of vines which covers the Médoc is no longer uninterrupted; it is now a blanket interspersed with rows of trees.

Château d'Agassac Haut-Médoc 2016

Place these new viticultural approaches in the context of a region rich in state-of-the-art vinification facilities, many of which have been upgraded during the course of the past two decades (well, the profits from 2009 and 2010 had to be spent somewhere), and put in place a meticulous approach to the harvest based on tasting, terroir and technological assessment of the fruit, and the scene is set for some superb wines. And the joy is, as already noted above, this is not restricted to the grandest names of the appellation. The viticultural revolution (yes, with a helping hand from the climate, when she is in a benevolent mood) filters down to all levels.

Later this week I hope to see some further evidence of this as I head to London for the annual Cru Bourgeois tasting, this year focusing on the 2020 vintage. This weekend, however, I thought I would look back to an earlier vintage of repute. From the past decade it strikes me that 2016 is one of the most notable of recent vintages in Bordeaux, so why not start here?

Located at the southern end of the Haut-Médoc appellation. Château d’Agassac is a leading Cru Bourgeois property. Having been ranked at the very top in the original 1932 classification, the 2020 classification (based on the vintages from 2012 to 2016, and applied to the labels of vintages from 2018 to 2022) saw Château d’Agassac one of just 14 properties to be ranked – and it is well deserved, as I have long been impressed by the wines – as Cru Bourgeois Exceptionnel. The estate is, by the way, a joy to visit; to describe the château as ‘fairy tale’ does not do it justice, and a recent change of hands, the property having been sold to Gérard Jicquel in 2021, has brought new investment and some wine tourism initiatives.

Anyway, back to the 2016 vintage. The 2016 Château d’Agassac displays a deep and delicately glossy appearance in the glass, a dark core with a thin rim of a more claretty hue. The nose is, at eight years of age, still packed with sweet fruit, the blackcurrant and blackberry coming to the fore, laced with notes of black pepper and black olive, and it still comes wrapped in a thread of youthful toasted oak which needs more time to integrate. The aromatic profile is echoed by the style on the palate, which is dense, glossy and laced with peppered olive, tobacco and liquorice, all dark and smoky, and supported by a rich frame of ripe tannins. This is fresh yet substantial and structured, but right now it also feels rather solid in its structure and – having tasted plenty of fine and aromatic 2016s in Bordeaux over the past three or four years – it seems to me it more closed down than expected. If you have any, don’t pull the cork right now; leave this one to rest in the cellar for five years or more, to see it come together. 93/100

All in all this is a fine example of how a top-performing Cru Bourgeois property can deliver the Bordeaux goods at a fair price. Look beyond the big expensive labels of the region, and I hope you will agree with me that, right now, Bordeaux drinkers (as opposed to label drinkers) have never had it so good. (11/11/24)

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