Some revolutions happen in the back room. At Château Rieussec, it takes place in a small side room. The second part of the bottling of the 2019 vintage is on the agenda, specifically: labeling, encapsulation, and packaging in boxes. During this process, an employee places the freshly filled and corked bottles from large metal boxes onto a conveyor belt that takes them to an automatic combination system consisting of a laser coder, capsule applicator and labeler. At the end of the line, a second employee receives the bottles and finally packs them into handy cartons.
So far, so normal. But the bottles are not transparent, but dark green and bulbous, the labels are not distinguished white and gold, but yellow, and six-piece wooden crates have become four-piece cardboard boxes. Involuntarily, one asks oneself: And what about the wine? After all, Rieussec has been a Premier Grand Cru Classé since 1855, a neighbor of the legendary Château d’Yquem and itself one of the world’s great sweet wines. Does Rieussec still taste like Rieussec?
A redefined image
Indeed, when Saskia de Rothschild presented the new packaging for Château Rieussec’s latest vintage in October 2021, there was much amazement. “We had to break with the codes of Sauternes,” the young president of Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite), to which Rieussec belongs, dictated into journalists’ microphones, “because its aura is fading and its consumption has become rare and limited to end-of-year celebrations.” Wine, de Rothschild continued, “has made itself comfortable in tradition, folklore and convention, without caring about the rest of the world.” A wine for a “classicism” of yesterday that had not arrived in the lifestyle or gastronomy of today, she said.
“We had to break with the codes of Sauternes”
Saskia de Rothschild
So her team redefined Rieussec’s image, first by rejuvenating it and second by consistently moving it toward sustainability. As is common at this level, they didn’t settle for half measures: Because transparent glass can’t be made from recycled, dark green, 96 percent PCR, or post-consumer recycled glass, bottles from the Bold series by Spanish specialist Estel were chosen. Studio Laure Flammarion reduced the traditional label with the emblematic crown of the Sauternais to abstraction – and, with the peel-off back label containing the minimum information required by law, encourages the bottle to continue to be used as a vase after enjoying the wine.
A mixed response
Swiss agency Big Game came up with the idea for a second cork attached to a yellow cord from Corderie Palus: This should be used after opening the bottle to take out a glass again and again for various occasions – after all, an opened bottle of Sauternes lasts a good month in the fridge. And finally, the cardboard box for four bottles comes from the British packaging specialist DS Smith – which, on the one hand, is more resource-friendly and, on the other hand, would be more in line with modern shopping habits (and, it must be added, also the significantly higher sales price).
In any case, the response was immense. “Saskia de Rothschild shakes up the Sauternes” wrote the French daily newspaper “Le Monde”. There were also comments in “Le Figaro” (“Desacralization”) and the “Financial Times”. In contrast to Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey, whose bottles had recently undergone a very noble redesign linked to tradition by Silvio Denz’s affiliation to the Lalique group, Saskia de Rothschild wanted to completely break with the established, the “codes of Sauternes” in the case of Château Rieussec.
The reaction was initially ambivalent: For example, one may wonder – since the cork is obviously inspired by the children’s game Bilboquet and wine drinkers with daughters must involuntarily think of “Little Princess” by Tony Ross when they see the stylized crown – whether graphic simplification must necessarily lead to infantilization. For others, the bottle reminds them more of olive oil than Sauternes. Her father Eric, at any rate, confessed Saskia de Rothschild, would hate the bottle, and he had asked her to produce a few cases in the old look. But her answer was very clear: “It’s a definitive change, not a limited series, we can’t play a double game.”
A style that changes, a DNA that stays
At the end of November 2021, shortly after the grape harvest, there is a concentrated working atmosphere at Château Rieussec. In the morning, Edouard Massie (photo below right), a consultant from Oenoconseil, which has an office in nearby Preignac, has arrived. A five-person team from Château Rieussec, including technical director Olivier Trégoat, operations manager Jean de Roquefeuil (photo below left) and cellar master Bertrand Roux, will discuss a whole series of young wine samples with him: lees-clouded batches from 2021 as well as barrel samples from the previous vintage. The questions are manifold: which plots are promising, which barrels are best suited?
In fact, Rieussec’s wine has also changed since the last few vintages, not just the bottle. “We want less residual sweetness and less noticeable wood influence in the wine,” says Olivier Trégoat. That is simply what the market demands. This would make Château Rieussec, from which an average of 72,000 bottles are produced, easier to consume for the younger generation and more suitable for use in the world of gastronomy. “But,” adds Trégoat, “we want to increase the length and intensity as much as possible. Rieussec should retain its DNA.”
A long history
This is not the first change of style at Château Rieussec. And because the winery ranks among the top wines of the Bordelais due to its location and classification, it is closely followed by sweet wine collectors all over the world. Rieussec, whose name presumably comes from a small, often dried-up stream (French “ruisseau” and “sec”) that runs between Château d’Yquem and Château Rieussec and also forms the municipal boundary between Sauternes and Fargues, was owned by the church before the French Revolution. An estate of the Carmelite order from Langon, to which Château Les Carmes Haut-Brion near Bordeaux also belonged and which still gives its name to the second wine Carmes de Rieussec. The fact that there were no owners of nobility among the frequently changing owners in the following century was probably the reason why Rieussec never received a château like most of its neighbours.
Nevertheless, in the 1855 list of “Vins blancs classés de la Gironde”, it was categorised as a “Premier Cru” just behind the “1er Cru Supérieur” Château d’Yquem in a group of nine other wine estates. This was not least due to its location. It is situated on a 76-metre-high hilltop, just two metres below its neighbour Yquem and, like the latter, on the central terrace above the Ciron and Gironde rivers, which offers the best conditions for viticulture in the region with its clayey-sandy gravel soil on a limestone base.
Awakening from a deep slumber
Nevertheless, it was not until 1971 that the winery was awakened from its slumber. In that year, it was acquired by Albert Vuillier, whose family came from the French Pyrenees and had made a lot of money with a grocery chain. Vuillier himself was a great lover of sweet wine and was the first owner to live in Rieussec again for a long time. Because it was a personal concern of his to make the wine one of the best in the appellation, he invested a lot of money in new barrels and put a huge amount of effort into the harvest with up to eight harvests – which changed the style of Rieussec.
The previously always elegant, almost Barsac-like wine became darker, heavier and more direct, the flavours that had previously been reminiscent of lime cake now dominated by sultanas and roasted notes. In 1975 and especially 1976, with minimal yields – three vines produced just one glass of Sauternes – wines emerged that were criticised in the British press as unbalanced and “overblown” and whose ageing potential was questioned. Hard economic times and poor climatic vintages soon meant that Vuillier ran out of money. At the end of the decade, he began to look for an investor. However, it was only after he had produced what was probably his best Rieussec with the 1983 vintage that the Rothschild family stepped in and acquired a majority stake in Château Rieussec the following year and soon became the sole owner.
Under the umbrella of the Rothschild Group
Not much changed in terms of style at first. Although a new estate manager arrived in 1985 in the person of Charles Chevallier (he was to become director of Château Lafite in 1994), Vuillier continued to advise the estate for a few more years. In fact, the new owner made it possible to work even more precisely at Rieussec, for example by purchasing pneumatic presses and fermenting in wooden barrels. In some years, the proportion of Sauvignon was close to zero, while the proportion of new wood increased even further. Furthermore, a clearer distinction was made between Grand Vin and second wine (whereby Rieussec also bottled wines bearing the names of parcels away from the actual lieu-dit “Rieussec”, such as Clos Labère, a lieu-dit of this name south of Rieussec, or Château Cosse, after a lieu-dit around a farmstead east of Rieussec, in addition to the actual second wine – today “Carmes de Rieussec”). Vintages such as 1993 and 2012 were even skipped altogether.
A barrique cellar was built in 1989, new rooms for fermentation were inaugurated in 2000 and parts of the estate were renovated, while the vineyard area was expanded from 40 to a good 85 hectares. The acclaim came quickly. The British critic Clive Coates declared Rieussec to be “Sauternes ‘super-second'” and found that its wines came closest to the character of Yquem and were “the fullest, the most luscious, the richest” of the other Premier Crus. The “Wine Spectator” named Rieussec 2001 Wine of the Year 2004 with a full 100 points – something that no Sauternes had achieved before or was to repeat.
Tempi passati. Shortly afterwards, the golden yellow colour of the Sauternes began to take on a duller shimmer. Even if exports to Asia gave some cause for hope, the classic wine consumer increasingly distanced himself from French sweet wine. Since 2000, as reported by “Le Figaro”, the small appellation, which accounts for only 2 to 3 per cent of the Bordelais, has lost half of its producers and its turnover, a quarter of its production and 15 per cent of its vineyard area. Some winegrowers advertised “Sauternes on the Rocks” or created their own cocktails. For others, the time had come to step up the cultivation of dry white wines.
New rules for the dry R
An R dry from Château Rieussec has been produced at Rieussec since 1979 – something that estate director Olivier Trégoat is not uncritical of in retrospect. “We simply made the dry wines with a similar attitude and the equipment for the sweet wines, which was a misunderstanding.” This began in the vineyard. In Sauternes, Sémillon is king because its thin berry skins are an ideal starting point for the fungus Botrytis cinerea to cause the coveted noble rot. It causes the flavour metamorphosis, lush texture and enormous concentration of the sweet wines from the Gironde. Accordingly, everything in the Sauternais is centred on them.
At Rieussec, where the grapes consist of 83 per cent Sémillon, 15 per cent Sauvignon and 2 per cent Muscadelle, several full-time employees work to ensure the right pruning. In addition, the grape variety, which is not very sensitive to oxygen, is fermented in wood and matured in plenty of new wood. The Sauvignon grape, which makes up around half of the R blend, now has its own training programme for pruning in Sancerre. More attention is paid to the harvest date for Sauvignon (before the formation of boytritis) and special grape presses that are better protected against oxidation are used. Only a good 20 per cent of the wines for the R are fermented in wood to preserve the grape fruit and freshness.
However, the main focus at Rieussec is still on the Grand Vin. With the handover from Eric de Rothschild to his daughter Saskia and the replacement of Charles Chevallier as Technical Director in 2017 by Eric Kohler (from 2020 by Olivier Trégoat) and, at the same time, of Operations Manager Frédéric Magniez by the long-standing Chef de Culture, Jean de Roquefeuil, the time had come to also tackle the stylistic change in sweet wine. The task for the new team was certainly ambitious. Not only was sustainability (as in all domains and châteaux of the Rotschild Group) to become an integral principle of production. In addition, the consequences of the climate crisis were to be overcome and the wine adapted to a new public and its consumer behaviour.
Adapting to climate change
Today, Château Rieussec has been organically farmed for three years and has applied for official certification in 2021. As on the other Rothschild estates, the team works closely with the research and development department under Manuela Brando. The main focus at Rieussec is on trials for the so-called dose modulation of plant protection products, in which the respective quantity should correspond exactly to the vitality of the vines in order to minimise the total dose as much as possible. To this end, the vitality of the entire vineyard has been mapped for some time using GreenSeeker proximity sensors and compared with data from aeroplanes and drones.
The impact of the climate crisis is very real. For Olivier Trégoat, it is leading to an ever-decreasing natural balance. “The hot summers of recent years”, he explains, “also threaten the development of our unique noble rot”. The higher temperatures result in thicker berry skins and higher phenol levels – which makes the berries more resistant to the boytritis fungus. As a result, the time between the first grape ripening and noble rot increases. In some cases, the harvest now extends over eight weeks into November.
“For no other wine is the importance of the vintage as great as for Sauternes,” says Trégoat. Sometimes the “Pourriture noble” affects a good 60 per cent of the harvest, then again only 10 per cent and sometimes it fails completely. A good 100 harvest workers are deployed every year to collect the berries at the perfect ripening time in numerous rounds in each parcel (which also makes sorting tables in the cellar superfluous). The cryo-extraction process, which was introduced in the nineties with great hopes, i.e. the pressing of frozen grapes so that the water remains in the marc as ice crystals, was quickly mothballed.
The impact of geology
As research has shown that the development of noble rot also depends on the soil, more attention is now being paid to geology. Olivier Trégoat is one of the region’s most prominent soil scientists and, among other things, wrote a pedological map of Château d’Yquem before joining the Rotschild Group. The fact that he replaced Eric Kohler as Technical Director of Rieussec (and L’Évangile) after just three years shows how important geology has become at Rothschild. Precise mapping of the Rieussec terroir should lead to more suitable varietal plantings (and rootstocks) in the future in order to optimise conditions for the occurrence of boytritis.
The average proportion of Sauvignon in the Grand Vin has already increased. Compared to the rather neutral but very creamy Sémillon grape (whose very high proportion in the blend has always been part of Rieussec’s character), it stands for lively acidity and fruit. On the one hand, this can bring balance to the wine in hot years such as 2018 (where there was an unusual 25 per cent Sauvignon in the blend), but it is also particularly appreciated by wine drinkers of the younger generation. Since 2017, the residual sugar content has been reduced from 140 (sometimes 160) to around 120 grams per litre and the wood influence of the barrels (mostly from the family’s own tonnellerie in Pauillac) has been reduced, less through the ratio of new and one-year-old barriques of around 1:1 than through a shorter ageing period of just 18 months in some cases and lighter toasting.
The Tasting
This made the presentation of three generations of Rieussec by the estate manager Jean de Roquefeuil all the more fascinating. After a prelude with the dry R from 2019, whose gooseberry nose revealed Sauvignon and the viscous texture Sémillon, but whose complexity suffered a little from the short vegetation phase of the vintage, the just-filled Grand Vin from the same vintage marked the first act. Indeed, the pale golden yellow colour, which is atypical of Rieussec, catches the eye right from the start. Hints of dates are joined by notes of lime zest – or “lemon meringue pie”, as Jean de Roquefeuil puts it. He agrees that the 119 grams of residual sugar are very well balanced by the acidity. 2010 (from the half bottle) then impresses with its honey-apricot aromas and is still strongly characterised by the primary fruit with a lot of power and noticeable residual sweetness.
The final act belongs to the 1976 vintage. Controversial, because the supposedly over-extracted wine was not predicted to have a long future, and from a bottle that had been open for a while – but suddenly it was there, the magic of Sauternes: in the glass, the dark copper of a classic Rieussec, with notes of leather and precious wood, and after further aeration also some orange marmalade. Noticeable acidity on the palate, good mouthfeel and a very long, slightly bitter finish. Looking at the cellar-stained bottle, with the gold on the label as darkened as the wine, a sense of melancholy sets in. However, the scepticism that prevailed when I first saw the new bottle shape has vanished after my visit to Château Rieussec. After all, the revolutions of today were still the traditions of tomorrow.
This article is a republication of an article from FINE – Das Weinmagazin 2/2022
Image rights
Stefan Pegatzky / Time Tunnel Images
