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Château Quinault L’Enclos 2004

Time for another episode of ‘What Does That Wine Taste Like Now?’ this week, as I disappear into the darkest recesses of the cellar to pull out a wine I last took a gander at maybe ten, fifteen or twenty years ago. I have been amusing myself in this manner for close to a year now, ever since I revisited the 1989 Chasse-Spleen last summer.

The object of the game is simple; figure out which has changed the most since I last pulled the cork, the estate, the wine, my palate, or all three.

In the meantime I have been mixing it up with other old (or old-ish) Bordeaux not previously featured in my Weekend Wine slot, such as the 1970 La Croix de Gay or 1994 Léoville-Las-Cases which also recently appeared on these pages.

Well, it all keeps me from getting up to other forms of mischief.

And so this week we come to the 2004 Château Quinault L’Enclos, a wine I think I must have bought when they were fresh on the market, soon after bottling, as this vintage was first featured as a Weekend Wine 17 years ago, in March 2008.

So what’s changed since?

Well, it might be easier to kick off a discussion of what has not changed at Quinault L’Enclos, as during the years that have passed since this vintage was bottled the property has undergone a radical transformation. This 2004 hails from the era of Alain Raynaud, who by coincidence also owned a stake in the aforementioned La Croix de Gay. He had bought Château Quinault in 1997, quickly adding the L’Enclos suffix, presumably to add a little air of exclusivity. Sadly it was not all plain sailing for Alain, as the crop was hit by frost in 2002, the heat waves of 2003 naturally caused havoc on these gravelly soils, and there was hail damage in 2004.

He eventually sold the property in 2007, the buyer LVMH, who already had a firm foothold in the region as proprietors of Cheval Blanc.

Château Quinault L'Enclos 2004

By this time I was already a regular visitor to Bordeaux, for the primeurs and the in-bottle tastings, and my schedule would naturally include a visit to taste at Château Cheval Blanc. I remember the expansion of the LVMH portfolio, and alongside Château Cheval Blanc and the second wine, Le Petit Cheval, there now appeared two other wines, Château Quinault L’Enclos and another LVMH purchase, Château La Tour du Pin.

Of the two newcomers my personal preference was often for La Tour du Pin (I might be an outlier in this, but you have to call it as you see it), and indeed I recall buying some around this time, the 2009 vintage if I recall correctly. The team at Château Cheval Blanc saw it differently though; whereas Château Quinault L’Enclos was showered with attention, including a conversion to organic viticulture and subsequent promotion to the 2012 St Emilion classification, La Tour du Pin was broken up and put to new use. Two parcels were absorbed into the vineyard of Château Cheval Blanc, while the rest were top-grafted or replanted to white, and it is now the source of the LVMH white, Le Petit Cheval Blanc.

Anyway, I digress. Back to Quinault L’Enclos. The change in hands, together with the focus on organics, and a shift away from the richer extraction and use of small oak barrels in the cellar which Alain Raynaud favoured, inevitably resulted in a change in style. Gone were the rather robust wines of the Raynaud era, in came a more finessed, sinewy and elegant proposition. The wines have continued to improve since.

In modern times extraction and heavy use of oak are often decried, but there is one advantage to both methodologies (provided the wine is up to it) and that they undoubtedly bolster a wine’s potential for aging (even if they change its character, in youth and in old age, along the way). A good example are the wines of Domaine des Roches Neuves in Saumur-Champigny; Thierry Germain was often decried for his Bordelais approach, but some of his early wines have aged really well.

So too has the 2004 Quinault L’Enclos, where I can almost sense the extraction and oak which must have wrapped this up in its youth. Today, at just over twenty years of age, it still displays a great depth of colour in the glass, with a dark and broad core, and a dusty cherry-red rim. The nose is delightfully fresh, and filled with notes of dried currants, menthol, camphor and coffee bean, which admittedly does seem to speak of the rather restrained ripeness achieved in the 2004 vintage, along with the resolved oak. Nevertheless this translates into an attractively savoury, lean and modestly grained palate, with aromatic scents of menthol, white pepper and yeast extract, all laid over a dry backbone of peppery tannins, with a juicy and fine-boned texture, yielding to a bite of charred tannins at the end. It holds up well for twenty years of age, culminating in a long and sappy finish, although to be critical while this is undoubtedly true, I also feels it lacks a sense of complexity or intrigue. Perhaps that will come with more time, or perhaps not; in truth I think this may be on a downward slide now. If you have a bottle or two tucked away, time to get pulling the corks I think. The alcohol on the label is 13%. 92/100 (5/5/25)

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