What makes a wine really great? The price, the ratings, the lack of availability? Château Lafleur is the third most expensive wine in the Bordelais after Pétrus and Le Pin, the annals of the ‘Wine Advocate’ list no fewer than seven wines with an even 100 points and the quantity of 1,000 cases produced is ridiculously low. But his reputation is based on something else. His unique personality, the ability to move even experienced tasters and, as Jane Anson writes, ‘get your blood racing’.
‘Lafleur is not Bordeaux. Lafleur is Lafleur!’ Omri Ram, the estate’s régisseur and cellar master, makes an exclamation mark right at the start. But one that confuses. Because this tiny vineyard of just 4.58 hectares naturally belongs to the Bordelais as part of the Pomerol appellation. Neighbours such as Château Pétrus, Lafleur-Pétrus, L’Évangile and Vieux Château-Certan also all belong to the high nobility of the wine-growing region, even if they have never been officially classified. So what is different about Lafleur, what makes its wines so exceptional?
A saga in five acts
Omri Ram is convinced that the answer lies in the history of the winery. That is why every explanation must begin with a look back. He tells the story outside in the vineyard as we walk through its rows of vines. Not because of the coronavirus pandemic, but because it is so closely interwoven with the land of Château Lafleur. The 300 metre long and 150 metre wide rectangle – ‘un seul tenant’, as the French say – which is laid out like a garden with its intersecting longitudinal and transverse axes, takes us a good two hours to complete. It is a saga in five acts with three fascinating protagonists: the owner family, the terroir and the vines of Château Lafleur.
Basically, it all began when wine merchant Henri Gréloud, who lived in Libourne, acquired Château Le Gay, located on the northern border of the current Pomerol appellation, around 1850. At that time, Pomerol was far from being the wine-growing region it is today – and lagged far behind the Médoc on the left bank of the Gironde. In fact, the wines were mainly drunk in Libourne and the surrounding area at this time. However, the increasing demand from Belgium, for example, also awakened the ambition of merchants in Pomerol to impose a château labelling instead of the simple local designation of origin. Of course, this was difficult due to the complicated ownership structure. Even today, a good 30 winegrowers share the 120 hectares of Pomerol, the ‘Haut Plateau’, an area that is smaller than the property of every Premier Grand Cru from the Médoc.
Winemaker instead of merchant logic
So the merchants, who, like the Moueix family, mostly came from the Corrèze region in central France, also grouped together plots that were further apart in order to create sensibly marketable farm sizes. Henri Gréloud, whose family had owned the Château Grand Village vineyard in Mouillac in Fronsadais since 1650, followed the logic of a winegrower rather than a merchant. In 1872, he separated a part called ‘La Fleur’ from Le Gay, which he was convinced was of particular value, and built a modest estate there. The quality of ‘Château La Fleur’ was already ranked in third place in the 1893 edition of the Bordeaux bible by Cocks and Feret.
After Henri Gréloud’s death in 1900, his eldest son Charles inherited the estate. However, as he had no children, he sold the Châteaux Le Gay and Lafleur in 1915 to the Libourne wine merchant André Robin, who had married the daughter of his younger brother Edgard ten years earlier. Robin, who was also president of the Libourne Chamber of Agriculture and was later to be made a ‘Knight of Agricultural Merit’, was truly infatuated with his new life as a winegrower after acquiring the vineyards. He sold his business and now devoted himself exclusively to viticulture. Experienced in both animal and vine breeding, he created a vine nursery on the sandy soils of Le Gay, which enabled him to make a unique ‘Sélection massale’ of first-class old Bouchet vines (as Cabernet Franc is called in Pomerol) from the pre-phylloxera period and to replace older varieties such as Noir de Pressac (Malbec) with high-quality Merlot vines. This work, essentially completed in the 1930s, formed the second act and created the basis for the first ‘Golden Age’ of Château Lafleur.
The Robin sisters
In December 1947, however, André Robin died and the two wine estates passed into the hands of his two daughters Therèse and Marie. Under the leadership of the two unmarried and deeply religious sisters, who were ‘middle-aged’ at the time (the older one was 41, the younger one 35 years old, in the past they would probably have been called ‘spinsters’), act three and one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of modern viticulture began. While the business at Château Le Gay, which always came last in the order of the estates, continued more or less as usual, the sisters decided to honour their father at Château Lafleur, the ‘diamond’ of the family, by not changing a thing. The low-intervention practice that is so modern today found its first radical expression during the Robin sisters’ years of doing nothing.
This had very different effects. Their father’s motto of ‘quality over quantity’ remained fundamentally valid. But because, unlike him, they had no ‘peasant intuition’, weak vintages at Lafleur turned out to be particularly weak. Because of their Catholic faith, unripe or rotten berries were not sorted out but simply pressed. The time of harvest was generally determined by the impending autumn rains. When the time came, tradition dictated that Le Gay always started first. Two days later, the harvesters moved across the road and after two more days they finished with their neighbour. As a result, for decades Lafleur was the last vineyard in Pomerol to finish harvesting, sometimes with disastrous, sometimes with spectacular results.
Tradition over modernity
The aversion to anything new was particularly evident in the aversion to pesticides, synthetic fertilisers and mechanisation, which also literally flooded the vineyards of the Bordelais in those years. Out of avarice, the Robin sisters did not even keep horses for the vineyard work, but oxen instead. The first tractor, which they called a ‘beast’, was only purchased in 1975 because oxen had completely disappeared from the market as draught animals at that time. The planting density on Lafleur therefore still partly corresponds to the dense, oxen-friendly ‘Carré de Pomerol’ of 1.30 x 1.30 metres from the 19th century. When a real frost of the century hit the Bordelais in 1956, the manifest stubbornness of the sisters, which many called obstinacy, finally ensured that Château Lafleur took a fundamentally different direction from the rest of the region.
In fact, the region had experienced a very early spring in January, so that the vines had already soaked up water and the first shoots had formed. In February, the temperature then dropped below minus 20 degrees – with disastrous consequences. The crystallisation inside the vines shredded the wood and many vineyards looked like they had been in a firefight. A good 80 per cent of the vines in the Bordelais were destroyed, and as much as 90 per cent in the early-ripening Pomerol. In this situation, the government, which (also in memory of the 1930s with its fatal political consequences) wanted to prevent poverty in the countryside at all costs, launched a rapid and comprehensive aid programme. In a very short time, the best vines were selected from the few surviving ones and propagated clonally. This reduced the diversity of the vine gene pool in Pomerol. In addition, the Chamber of Agriculture in Libourne propagated ‘Merlot, Merlot, Merlot’ like a mantra and pushed for wide, machine-compatible planting distances.
A relic of the past
The Robin sisters did not uproot a single vine. Of course, Château Lafleur had also been hit by frost, but in their eyes the state rescue plan was just a new fashion. With the priest’s blessing, they trusted that under the ‘cavaillon’, the low mound of earth around the vine that could not be reached by the plough, one or two shoots were still viable in the old wood. The following spring, it turned out that a good 70 per cent of the old vines at Château Lafleur had actually survived. This is the reason why the oldest vines in Pomerol grow here and why the proportion of Cabernet Franc, at over 50 per cent, is higher than anywhere else in the appellation.
The far-reaching effects on the wine quality of Château Lafleur were, of course, not yet foreseeable at that time. While Jean-Pierre Moueix celebrated his first great successes in the 1950s with his advertising campaign for Pomerol as a whole and its neighbour Château Pétrus, particularly in the USA, demand for Lafleur remained modest and prices in the mid-1970s were still on a par with those of the fifth growth Château Grand-Puy-Lacoste from the Médoc. Year after year, the wine estate became more and more of a bizarre and unworldly place, a strange relic from the past that protrudes into the present and is more of a barn or stable for pets and farm animals than a wine estate.
Change of ownership
Finally, in 1984, Thèrese Robin died at the age of 77 and her sister Marie decided to step down from the management of Châteaux Le Gay and Lafleur. Instead, as the fourth act in the story, nephew Jacques Guinaudeau, who had already been managing the family vineyard Grand Village since 1980, took over the two Pomerol vineyards in so-called ‘métayage’, the traditional half-lease. By this time, however, a lot had already changed at Lafleur. In 1975, the estate was visited for the first time by the young wine critic Robert Parker, who was to launch a modest newsletter shortly afterwards, in which he was to certify ‘mixed results’ for Château Lafleur, but also awarded a remarkably high 96 points in vintages such as 1975.
The owner of the neighbouring Château Pétrus vineyard, the négociant Christian Moueix, had also taken notice and had been able to convince the elderly sisters in 1981 to include Lafleur in his sales portfolio and to have Jean-Claude Berrouet and his team from Château Pétrus carry out the vineyard and cellar work. By 1982, Château Lafleur had produced an exceptional wine, and when Robert Parker published the first edition of his Bordeaux Guide in 1985, Château Lafleur, which was recognised as having the quality of a ‘second growth’, was already ranked third in the Pomerol estate hierarchy behind Pétrus and Trotanoy.
The second ‘Golden Age’
Jacques Guinaudeau therefore had an idea of the strengths of Château Lafleur – even if his aunts had not left him any old vintages. But above all, he was aware of the estate’s great weakness: its irregularity. In fact, he told himself, there was no excuse for not making a great Lafleur every year – and if that didn’t work, then, as in 1987 or 1991, there was no Lafleur. In addition to a ‘major clean-up’ and investments in new barrels, for example, Guinaudeau’s first priority was the vineyard. It was now in poor condition, badly pruned and consisting of a good 30 per cent dead vines, between which many of the remaining vines had grown into veritable ‘monster vines’ due to a lack of competition for nutrients.
Guinaudeau decided on a ‘complanation’, i.e. mixed plots of new seedlings and a ‘reconstruction’ of the old vines, in which he turned the direction of growth of the old wood by 180 degrees and grew new fruit shoots from two water shoots from the old wood, which he trained – for the sake of greater balance – in a double Guyot pruning. Walking through the 21,000 or so vines of Lafleur today, some of the up to 100-year-old vines are reminiscent of the Ents from Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’. Instead of uniform rows of vines, there are gatherings of honourable individuals. They form the backbone of Château Lafleur and give it its almost Médoc-like structure – and are not least responsible for the second ‘Golden Age’ at Château Lafleur.
Vines and terroir
The search for new seedlings was also carried out in an unconventional way. Because Guinaudeau was not convinced by the quality of the Cabernet Franc material from the Bordelais, he planted seedlings from the Loire for the first time in 2000 in the ‘Le Puy’ parcel – which also failed to convince. So Guinaudeau reactivated the principle of ‘séléction massale’ by selecting and analysing 8,000 ‘interesting’ vines from Lafleur and finally propagating 120 of them in a specially established vine nursery at Château Grand Village. In the end, 64 Bouchet varieties were grafted onto the roots of the Loire vines – a unique diversity.
Jacques Guinaudeau had already opened another chapter in 1996 by turning his attention to the terroir of Lafleur. Under the leadership of Cornelis van Leeuwen, the leading terroir specialist at the University of Bordeaux, 13 different soil formations of Château Lafleur were mapped. The geologists discovered twelve soil types from the gravel family, each with different proportions of clay and sand, and only one with a dominance of ferrous clay. This is remarkable because it is precisely this ferrous clay to which Château Pétrus owes its fame. At Lafleur, this soil runs as a slightly diagonal valley (the 0.69-hectare parcel is called ‘La Bassine’, the ‘vat’) across the striking rectangle of vines on the estate. Today, it provides the grapes for ‘Les Pensées’.
The sixth generation
This wine, which has no longer been labelled ‘de Lafleur’ since 2018, is anything but a second wine, but the true Pomerol expression of Lafleur. Anything that does not meet the requirements is sold as cask wine. The grapes for the Grand Vin, however, come from gravelly sections, from the plots with Merlot such as ‘La Galle’, whose soils are reminiscent of the ‘Gallets rouges’ of the Rhone, or those planted with Bouchet on the ‘left bank’ such as ‘Le Levant’, the heart of Lafleur. For Jane Anson, this special feature of Lafleur, together with the directly neighbouring soil of Château Pétrus, forms the ‘yin and yang of the Pomerol myth’.
In 2001, the owner Marie Robin died, and Jacques Guinaudeau, his wife Sylvie and their three children Baptiste, Clara and Noëmie managed to raise the inheritance tax and pay off the remaining heirs in a tour de force the following year. Admittedly at the cost of having to sell Château Le Gay. Jacques and Sylvie Guinaudeau now took over the wine production independently, supported since 2005 by their son Baptiste and his wife Julie, who finally both took over the management of Château Lafleur in 2012 – as representatives of the sixth generation of the family and, for the time being, the last act in the history of the winery.
A balance of old and new
A year later, Omri Ram arrived at the winery. He had started out as a sommelier in Tel Aviv and had previously worked at wineries in Israel, Spain and New Zealand after studying viticulture and oenology in Montpellier. He was the only applicant to introduce himself by letter – which, unbeknownst to him, was a perfect fit for Château Lafleur. The temporary contract was extended several times, and eventually Ram slipped into the role of cellar master in charge – supported by Vincent Dupuch, the discreet but currently probably hottest external consultant on the right bank. But Ram looks after the vineyard just as intensively, because in the small team at Lafleur, titles and hierarchies are secondary and everyone is jointly responsible for everything.
Compared to the sustainable vineyard management, which at Lafleur is more like gardening, the work in the cellar is almost secondary. Nevertheless, a lot has changed compared to the Robin era (no destemming of the grapes, long maceration, hardly any new wood), but also compared to the eighties and nineties, which were modelled on Château Pétrus (with around two thirds new barriques). Instead of nostalgia, Omri Ram emphasises the balance between tradition and technology. The property, which is more reminiscent of a manor house than a château, was given a discreet extension in 2018, which houses the new wine cellar with its own grape reception area with double sorting, extended fermentation facilities and the barrel cellar for the one-year-old and two-year-old young wines.
An expanded portfolio
Today, the grapes are completely destemmed and no longer fermented in cement, but gently in eight stainless steel tanks with a capacity of 36 to 51 hectolitres – Omri Ram does not think much of smaller containers because the risk of over-extraction is too great. A quarter of the wines for the Grand Vin are then stored in new barriques and three quarters in barriques that have been used for eight months – preferably from the Darnajaou tonnelier for three generations, but also from Taransaud, because it is easier to stand on two legs. Omri Ran is not in favour of a greater variety of barrels, as is now often found in the region, because it impairs the clarity of expression of the wine.
Since Jacques and his son Baptiste Guinaudeau took over the winery, the wine world has changed dramatically. In the overheated markets between London, New York and Hong Kong, Château Lafleur is now one of the hottest investments around. This is one of the reasons why the family decided in 2019 to no longer sell through négociants, but to take distribution into their own hands in order to stay closer to the consumer. The product range was also expanded. In addition to the white and red Château Grand Village from the headquarters in Mouillac, the Perrières de Lafleur, which comes from Bouchet vines grown on Fronsac limestone with Lafleur genetics, and the rare white Les Champs Libres, which deserves its own story, have been available since the 2018 vintage (after a series of predecessors labelled Acte I to VIII). In any case, the Grand Vin is more than ever in outstanding, standard-setting condition – and in a vintage like 2016 it is already on the verge of perfection: with its almost ethereal nature despite its enormous density and crazy complexity, the silky texture and the refined perfume of dark fruits, violets, tobacco and a hint of truffle.
The values of Lafleur
There is still not a single sign for Lafleur on the roads and paths around the winery. Other signs, however, you have to know how to read. Until 2002, for example, the signature of the respective owners adorned the snow-white label of the wine. Since then, the name Greloud has once again been emblazoned on the label: both a reference by the family to the founder and a commitment to the unchanging values of Château Lafleur. Those who understand these have not yet solved the mystery of the wines, but at least they see them with different eyes.
The visit took place in November 2021.
The text is a slightly modified reprint of an article from FINE – Das Weinmagazin 1/2022.
Image rights
Stefan Pegatzky / Time Tunnel Images
