GRAPE VARIETIES: BORDEAUX WHITES

White Flight From Downtown Bordeauxville? Sauternes to the Rescue

It ain’t all resveratrol down here on the Reservation, kids, and as late as the 1960s, the most widely planted grape in Bordeaux was lily-white sémillon.

Likewise, the Detroit neighborhood where my folks bought their first house in the sixties was also white—Pillsbury Dough Boy white, if you must know. And it remained that way until urban blight, race riots and a bit more pelf in the status quo tiller sort of tilted the city sideways—and my parents, along with about half a million other caucasians, slithered to the suburbs.

In Bordeaux, the change was more horticultural than cultural. Some of it can be traced to 1963—the year that Martin Luther King led 150,000 Detroiters on the ‘March For Freedom’—when châteaux tried to come to terms with a poor vintage in the wake of the great frost of 1956 which destroyed many red wine vines. 60% of Bordeaux’s 1963 output was white, which meant that the estates only had a few years to sell the majority of their half-assed wines before they began to deteriorate.
This wake-up call, along with improved technology, saw a lot of Bordelaise vineyards replanted with more cold-resistent red varietals like cabernet sauvignon and merlot, and today, the region’s red wine production is nearly ninety percent of the total. The subject of white Bordeaux is almost an afterthought as the typical non-industry person’s ‘free association’ image of Bordeaux is of heavy, pricey, cellar-seekers like Lafite Rothschild, Latour and Haut-Brion.
And Sauternes.

SÉMILLON: Sauternes is the exception that proves the rule—succulent, sweet , rot-rich Sauternes, is generally sémillon-based; arguably the most age-worthy white wine on the planet—bottles that might have graced Thomas Jefferson’s cellar are still alive today. Of course, the most widely heralded name in the appellation is Château d’Yquem, the only white wine deemed worthy of Premier Cru Supérieur status in the 1855 Bordeaux classification.

D’Yquem’s ability not only to last, but to develop strata of complex and unique overtones as it does is due, in no small measure, to fungus—specifically botrytis cinerea, called Edelfäule in Germany and muffa nobile by the Italians. Gray fungus infections begin with damp weather during véraison—a viticultural term meaning ‘the onset of ripening’—and if the weather doesn’t clear up by harvest, this necrotrophic nightmare can destroy the crop: Nine vintages in the 20th Century were deemed unworthy of bearing the d’Yquem name. Usually, however, a period drying out allows botrytis cinerea to develop, causing the grapes to raisinate, concentrating the sugars and producing a wine of almost ethereal intensity and depth. Familiar flavors that emerge after a decade or so of aging are crème brûlée, orange marmalade, caramel and honeysuckle.

Most grapes are susceptible to botrytis (strawberries, too-when they get moldy in the refrigerator, that’s what it is), but sémillon is particularly so as its thin skin allow the easy permeation of spores. It is, however, a multi-faced grape that gets flabby in hot climates, and requires a cool weather face-slap every night or so to remain sharp and focused. In Bordeaux, it receives this sort of treatment, as it does in Chile, which has more acres planted to sémillon than anywhere else on earth. In South Africa, amid more white/non-white issues than either Bordeaux or Detroit, it was once the most abundant varietal, although today, it only makes up about 1% of vineyards; by contrast, 9.6% of the population is white. Australia is another zone which has embraced sémillon, and in the Hunter Valley , where it was once referred to as ‘riesling’, it produces a racy, toasty, citrus-soaked wine that can outpace the best of the dry sémillons from Pessac-Léognan, Graves and Entre-Deux-Mers. In California, it’s sort of stuck at the ‘getting to know you’ stage, but Washington has had some success with late harvest and ice wine versions.

The common denominator in most of these regions, including Sauternes and Barsac, is a reliance on the acid-retention skills of sauvignon blanc to liven up the sémillon shindig.

SAUVIGNON BLANC: Unlike the Loire—the ancestral seat of sauvignon blanc’s best French interpretation—as a stand-alone wine in Bordeaux, sauvignon blanc is pretty much nonexistent; Château Couhins-Lurton and Pavillon Blanc de Chateau Margaux are rare examples. Most of the biggest and brightest stars like Graves’ Château Smith Haut-Lafitte (selling for $80+ per bottle) blend in about five percent sémillon and another 5% of what, in Smith Haut-Lafitte’s case they call ‘a secret weapon’—a nearly forgotten varietal called SAUVIGNON GRIS, helping to round out a crisp palate of gooseberries, star fruit, and lemongrass. For the most part, sauvignon blanc prefers the compact chalk and marl soils found around the Loire River, where it results in wines of depth and elegance and frequently displays notes of hay, nettle and lime. In Bordeaux, sauvignon blanc tends to showcase stone fruits like peach and apricot along with floral and woody aromas.

MUSCADELLE: The only other grape of any real significance in white Bordeaux blends is muscadelle, named for its resemblance to, but not its relation to the more familiar varietal muscat. Like its sister grapes, muscadelle plantings have steadily decreased over the decades, with the only about two thousand acres remaining, mostly in the Entre-Deux-Mers. Most of the top whites from Bordeaux use less than 3% muscadelle in their blends, with one noted exception: Château Pape Clément Blanc, listed among the Grands Crus Classé of Graves and currently selling for a shade under $200 a fifth—it’s around 10% muscadelle. For a real feel for what this grape contributes to a bottle, you’ll need to travel a bit further south to Dordogne, where in the small AOC of Monbazillac there exists a muscadelle-based dessert wine that is a nice, lighter foil to the unctuous wines of Sauternes and Barsac.

The other grapes legally allowed for white Bordeaux are nothing more than ‘also rans’ and appear in such negligible quantities that they scarcely rate mention. UGNI BLANC and COLOMBARD produce wines that are thin and acidic and are best used as a base for distilling Cognac; MERLOT BLANC, a cross between merlot and folle blanche, is basic blah—better, if only slightly, in nearby Blaye, Bourg and Fronsac. ONDENC was once fairly popular throughout Bordeaux, but is now restricted to Gaillac and the AOCs of Bergerac, Côtes de Duras and Montravel. MAUSAC brings up the Bordeaux rear, although in Limoux—a subprefecture of Languedoc—makes a quaffable sparkling wine.

Ironically, although it’s less represented in production numbers and reviewer pixels than its redskinned brothers, most of the scientific progress over the past couple of decades has been in improving white Bordeaux—a new French paradox? There may, as a result, be a revived interest in planting white wine grapes here, just as a reverse ‘white flight’ has seen the children and grandchildren of those who fled in the Detroit Diaspora gentrify ghettos lofts and riverfront properties.
Here’s to the future, right?—let’s raise a glass of Carbonnieux and toast Clint Eastwood.