From €8.03, 14.59 Swiss francs and $21.99
7 Sep – and 'PeteonTweet' tells me that it's available at Carrefour as part of their Foire aux Vins for €9.50, a steal
Bordeaux insiders may read the name of this week's wine and think I have completely lost it. Ch Larose-Trintaudon, the largest wine estate in the Médoc with 215 ha, has not exactly been synonymous with high quality over the years, and of all recent Bordeaux vintages, 2007 is very far from the most glorious.
But I recently had a chance to look again at this extensive property and its wines and I can see that the team there has recently got the bit between the teeth and, from the 2007 vintage, has started to produce much, much better wines. Indeed, in the tasting notes of my detailed article Larose-Trintaudon reassessed, Purple pagers can see that I was actually more impressed by their 2007s than their 2005s – and there cannot be many Bordeaux estates of which this is true.
Thanks to a series of small technical changes, perhaps the most important of which is sorting the (machine-picked) grapes, but also monitoring the extraction process and ageing more than 90% of the resulting wine in barrels, of which up to a quarter are new, the 2007 and 2009 vintages that I tasted really had some weight and fresh, quite interesting fruit on the mid palate. This cru bourgeois now tastes much more respectable, and certainly tastes as though it should cost far more than it generally does.
But the retail prices of this wine, of which hundreds of thousands of cases are made each year, vary mysteriously. One expects this wine, well known in French supermarkets, to be cheapest in France itself. But even within France, there is an extraordinary difference between the lowest and highest prices logged by www.wine-searcher.com at the time of writing: €8.03 from Boottle as opposed to €17.40 from Château Classic Le Monde Grand Bordeaux. The only US stockist listed by Wine-Searcher, Bevme, is asking $21.99, which is the equivalent of €17.14, almost as much as the most expensive French stockists. Perhaps all this reflects special deals powered by the sheer volume of the wine produced. Berry Bros have listed this wine in their time, according to Global Wine Stocks, but I cannot find a current UK stockist, which is a shame. There is surely a deal to be done! Meanwhile, look out for it in French supermarkets.
The company, owned by insurance group Allianz, also make a rather grander wine, Ch Larose Pelargon – now incorporating some really rather smart land around Arcins to the south, whose vineyards are picked by hand, and whose wines are all aged in oak, much more of it new. The likes of Wine-Searcher don't seem to have heard of it, but again, the 2007 really is worth seeking out at the relatively modest price asked for it.
The 2009 Larose-Trintaudon is being offered to their direct customers at a mere $12 a bottle.
Find the 2007
