I’m sorry but this week there is no escape from Bordeaux. If I’m going to sacrifice my teeth and liver to deep immersion in the tannic 2004s as I did all last week and on which I am reporting all this week, you are going to have to suffer too.
Although George 2004 Côtes de Francs is no ordinary red bordeaux. For a start it is relatively reasonably priced – or at least this latest vintage certainly should be. The 2003 shows up on www.winesearcher.com in Germany and the US at just $17. What makes it particularly unusual however is its encepagement. Since this special cuvée’s inception in 2000 it has been dominated by Malbec, a favourite grape variety of the late George Thienpont after whom it is named. The Thienponts are, like the Lurtons and Moueixes, one of Bordeaux’s apparently ubiquitous families. Their roots lie in the Flemish wine trade where Jacques Thienpont of Le Pin is still based (presumably this business helped cushion the financial blow of declassifying the entire 2003 vintage of Le Pin). Alexandre Thienpont runs Vieux Château Certan with its splendid new chai and glorious 2004. Luc Thienpont has just sold Ch Labégorce-Zédé. Francois Thienpont is a Bordeaux wine merchant who has launched the Biturica range of inexpensive red and interesting white bottlings. His brother Nicolas runs Chx Pavie Macquin and Bellevue in St Emilion among others as well as the family’s home vineyard, acquired by George Thienpont just after the second world war. He replanted the vineyard in the 1970s and was a real, larger-than-life paterfamilias in the substantial château itself.
You can read more about Ch Pugeyraud in Vicky Bishop’s French ride. I remember it well from the early 1980s producing some of Bordeaux’s best-value medium term red, and certainly the Thienpont family could be said to be the pioneers of the modern Côtes de Francs region centred on the village of Francs just north of the Côtes de Castillon and north east of St Emilion.
Nicolas says about George the wine, which in 2004 is 35 per cent Malbec with 35 per cent Cabernet Franc, 20 per cent Merlot and 10 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon, that he makes it so that his father can follow the progress of his beloved Malbec from heaven. It’s certainly extremely unlike any Argentine Malbec and bears no relation to any Cahors I have come across but is a delightfully rich, velvety wine whose only fault at this stage is a particularly sudden finish.
I enjoyed it much more than the only other Malbec-dominated wine I encountered in my Bordeaux 2004 tastings, Christian Veyry’s Ch Montfollet 2004 Blaye which is 60 per cent Malbec with 40 per cent Merlot and has extremely tough tannins. But either wine would be a superb candidate for a tricky blind tasting. Both are indisputably red bordeaux but with a distinctly unusual major ingredient.
And talking of Malbec, a fascinating blind tasting exercise undertaken at the beginning of this month in St Emilion, nothing strictly to do with the 2004 primeurs, demonstrated to me that Cahors is now making a few wines virtually indistinguishable from Mendoza Malbec. I shall be reporting on this in more detail.