There is a revolution going on in this sleepy wine center 30 miles east of Bordeaux, a wine revolution that has shaken the foundations of the most important region in France. Like all revolutions, it began with a small group of people with the audacity to question the way things were always done. The group bears the unlikely name of garagistes, a label manufactured for people who make wine in garages. None of them actually does, but insofar as the name sets them apart as iconoclasts, it is accurate.
The garagistes make exceptionally good wines in exceptionally small quantities and sell them for exceptionally high prices.
At least a dozen are made in St. Emilion, but garage wines are now also cropping up in the Medoc, that most traditional of all the Bordeaux regions; in the Graves, south of the city of Bordeaux; and in Italy and Spain. Buyers, often on the Internet, are fighting to spend as much as $1,000 a bottle for wine that, in some instances, no one ever heard of before.
Now the whole wine world is caught up in a swirling controversy: Are these great modern wines made by people willing to break the mold, or are they overhyped trophies for the moneyed collector?
The original garage wine comes from Pomerol, the wine commune adjacent to St. Emilion and the home of Petrus. It is called Le Pin, which means the Pine Tree. Its entire vineyard is only about five acres, and it rarely produces more than 600 cases of wine a year. The wine cellar is in a battered old farmhouse on the plateau of Pomerol, less than a mile from Petrus.
Like many of these “new” winemakers, Le Pin is owned by a family with deep roots in the wine business: the Thienponts, Belgians who owned chateaux in Bordeaux since the 1920s. Their best-known property is Vieux Chateau Certan, which adjoins Le Pin. When the Thienponts bought the tiny plot that became Le Pin in 1979, they planned merely to extend the Vieux Chateau Certan vineyards.
“When we realized that Le Pin soil was very special, we decided to keep it separate,” Jacques Thienpont said. “So we created Le Pin.”
In 1985, the Thienponts acquired another, adjoining hectare–2.5 acres–from the local blacksmith. In the early ’80s, word began to spread that an astonishingly good Pomerol was being made from a tiny vineyard just down the road from Petrus, and with the 1981 vintage Le Pin began to take on cult status.
When its wine began to surpass Petrus in important tastings, it became the hottest property in Bordeaux–in France, some would say.
Other winemakers took notice. By the mid-’90s, almost a dozen new wines had appeared, all of them made in Le Pin style–rich, full-bodied, packed with flavor–all made in extremely small quantities and most of them made in St. Emilion.
Since a number of these new wines were produced, not in great chateaux but in modest digs similar to Le Pin, a French writer, Nicholas Baby, dubbed them vins de garage and the people who make them garagistes.
Hardly any garagiste is happy with the title. And there is nothing casual or make-do about these micro-cuvees. The formula is simple: small quantities of the best grapes; severe selection, which means cutting away excess bunches during the growing season and retaining only about half of the harvested grapes; new oak barrels every year; and hands-on care up to and including the bottling.
Among the best-known garagistes here in what is known as Bordeaux’s Right Bank (of the Garonne River) are Valandraud, La Mondotte, La Gomerie, Barde-Haut, Pavie Macquin, Gracia, Grand Murailles and Tertre Roteboeuf, all of them in St. Emilion. In the Medoc, the home of the greatest Bordeaux chateaux, a newcomer named Marojallia, from the commune of Margaux, is priced even above Chateau Margaux itself.
In the Ribera del Duero, in northern Spain, Pingus by the Danish enologist Peter Sisseck has created as much sensation as any St. Emilion wine, selling in Spanish restaurants for $500 a bottle. In Italy, Palazzi from the Tenuta di Trinoro and Lamborghini Campoleone have had the same effect. In irreverent Australia, a garage wine made from shiraz (the grape is called syrah in the Northern Hemisphere) is called Duck Muck.
Inspired by California?
All of these wines owe some of their popularity to the success of so-called cult wines of California, themselves mostly a phenomenon of the late ’80s and early ’90s. With wines from microscopically small properties like Harlan Estate, Bryant Family Vineyards, Screaming Eagle, Marcassin and Araujo sold only through mailing lists and bringing four-figure prices when they are resold, it was probably only a matter of time before winemakers elsewhere caught on.
Serious wine drinkers will pay a lot for the finest wines; collectors will pay that much and much more. The price for most of these wines at the cellar door, so to speak, is high but manageable. Unfortunately, the wines are all spoken for before the grapes are crushed.
For most of the world, the only places to go to buy these wines is the auction room or auctions on the Internet. At a Sotheby’s auction in November, four bottles of the 1982 Le Pin were offered at a starting price of $5,000 to $7,000.
The next of these wines to make an international reputation was Valandraud, which Jean-Luc Thunevin makes in a beautiful little winery–it may once have really been a garage–hidden away in the center of old St. Emilion. Valandraud first appeared in 1991. Thunevin comes from an old Bordeaux wine family. It is his wife who makes the Margaux garage wine Marojallia.
La Mondotte, which became a garage wine in 1996, is made by Count Stephan von Neipperg at one of his other properties, Chateau Canon-La-Gaffeliere, also in St. Emilion. Like many of these hot new wines, La Mondotte is not new at all. It appears in records dating back to the middle of the 19th Century and may well have existed for a century before that.
Chateau Barde-Haut is another “new” wine that has been around for a long time. Its present owners, the Garcin-Cathiard family, have owned it only since the middle of September. Its previous owner, having developed the property along garagiste lines, found himself in trouble with French tax inspectors, sold off his holdings, including Barde-Haut, and moved to Monaco.
Helene Garcin Leveque, a daughter of the Garcin-Cathiards, who own Clos l’Eglise in Pomerol, is charged with running Barde-Haut. She and her husband, Patrice Leveque, who also comes from a chateau-owning family, are developing yet another garage wine on a tiny plot his family has in the Graves.
La Gomerie, also in St. Emilion, emerged as a garage wine in the mid-’90s. Once the private vineyard of an abbey, La Gomerie is owned by Gerard and Dominique Becot, who also own the adjoining Chateau Beau-Sejour Becot.
Traditionalists perturbed
In a hidebound region like Bordeaux, garage wines provoke considerable controversy. Partly it involves the people who make them, who are often seen as newcomers, insensitive to Bordeaux’s tradition of making subtle, less forward, complex wines. Partly it involves the enologist Michel Rolland, a longtime advocate of big-bodied, flamboyant wines, who has been a driving force behind many of these new labels, and partly it is a reaction to the powerful American critic Robert M. Parker Jr., who has been effusive in his praise of the garage wines and of Rolland.
Bordeaux traditionalists maintain that these new wines have no track record. Who knows, they ask, how well these new wines will develop, how long they will last?
Of course, no one knows. At the same time, the wines are immensely attractive, which should be reason enough to welcome them.
Still, it should be noted that they are not always as stupendous as they are made out to be. In comparing the 1998 La Gomerie with the 1998 Beau-Sejour Becot, I found the more traditional wine clearly superior in elegance and harmony or balance. The same was true of the Barde-Haut when compared with Clos l’Eglise and La Mondotte with Canon-La-Gaffeliere. I thought Le Pin equal, perhaps even a bit superior to its sibling next door, Vieux Chateau Certan. But I tasted them separately, which is not as good as having them side by side.
The success of these wines will undoubtedly inspire many more. I heard of a least a dozen startups while I was in France and Italy. Some will be poor imitations, but others will be good wines in this same modern style. They should come as no surprise. Bordeaux has been coming around slowly, like a great ship in the center of a harbor, for years.
At a recent tasting of 1985 and 1995 Bordeaux and California cabernets, it was easy to distinguish the 1985 Bordeaux from the 1985 cabernets. Ten years on, it was tough to tell which was which. The Bordeaux had become startlingly similar to the California wines.
