Time to re-think Bordeaux

Paradise Rescued Block One Cabernet Franc, Bordeaux, France 2016 (£18, winebuyers.com) Bordeaux may be the world’s most famous red wine region, but how many people actually drink its produce these days? There’s a persistent sense, even among serious wine enthusiasts, that it’s become too polarised. On the one hand, some of the most expensive wines in the world, wines that are doomed, as the Observer’s David Mitchell put it recently, to become “investment wine, not drinking wine… notional, like a currency”. On the other, a sea of mediocre reds, with interchangeable names above the same line drawing of a château on the label. As a result, the region has begun to seem a little off the pace when compared to the dynamism of countless rising-star wine regions across the globe. But there’s much more to the enormous Bordeaux region than the twin extremes of the dull and the deluxe. With its uncharacteristically striking label, the swish, silky, fresh blackcurrant of Paradise Rescued Block One shows a different side to Bordeaux.

Marks & Spencer Classics Claret, Bordeaux, France 2019 (£7, Marks & Spencer) Paradise Rescued is not your usual Bordeaux estate in other ways. It’s the work of an Englishman with a background in chemical engineering, David Stannard, who bought up the land around his holiday home in the village of Cardan, initially as a way of protecting it from developers, and then, as an increasingly serious wine project, overseen by local mother-and-daughter team Pascale and Albane Bervas. Both the wines that Stannard’s PR sent me to try (there’s also a merlot-cabernet franc blend), exhibit one of Bordeaux red wine’s most attractive features: that combination of ripe black and red fruit with an appetising freshness and some food-friendly tannin. In the recent run of warm vintages in the region, you can also find this combination in some superb-value everyday wines: your basic supermarket claret, such as M&S’s excellent, recently re-badged example, can be a crunchy-fruited, thirst-quenching, inexpensive joy.

Château Lagrange Les Fiefs de Lagrange, St-Julien, Bordeaux, France 2016 (from £26, thewinesociety.com; farrvintners.com; crsfw.com) The very best wines from the top châteaux in Bordeaux’s rather rigid class system may be off-limits to most of us: even in the midst of a global pandemic, in which the top estates all dropped their prices significantly, the latest (2019) vintage of Château Lafite-Rothschild was still going for significantly more than £5,000 per case before tax and duty in UK merchants when it was sold en primeur (ie, before the wine has finished ageing) earlier this year. But that doesn’t mean that quality of the kind that will make you see why the region developed its fine wine reputation in the first place isn’t available to a slightly wider audience. One route is to buy one of the top estate’s so-called second wines, such as Château Pichon-Longueville’s polished, plush Tourelles de Longueville 2014 (£25, justerinis.com) and Château Lagrange’s elegant, fragrant Les Fiefs 2016, both of which capture much of the style, panache and resonant depth of their estate’s flagship productions at a fraction of the price.

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