Strife Over Saint-Émilion Rankings Pits Upstarts vs. Aristocrats

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/dining/19iht-wine19.html

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SAINT-ÉMILION, FRANCE — In winter, when the tourists have left and the new vintage is slumbering, Saint-Émilion is quiet. In the ancient core, honey-colored stone townhouses cluster around a 13th-century fortress, ringed by sumptuous vineyards that produce one of the greatest wines of Bordeaux.

But the calm is deceptive. A fragile, four-year truce among local producers was shattered this week when several chateau owners said they had filed lawsuits seeking to overturn the latest official ranking of the wines of Saint-Émilion. A new classification was published late last year, following the annulment of the previous listing in 2009, after a long legal battle.

The troubled story of the Saint-Émilion classification reflects a broader cultural, political and economic debate that is raging across France: Should the country reward merit in the cause of progress, even if that means casting aside the less fortunate? Or should it cling to entitlements, at the cost of reining in the ambitious?

It starts with a bit of history. In Bordeaux, Saint-Émilion, 50 kilometers east of the city, about 30 miles, is the nouveau riche. To the west, across the Gironde estuary, the aristocratic chateaus of the Médoc were ranked long ago, in 1855, and the classification has been revised only once.

At the time, Saint-Émilion was a backwater. The potential of its terroir for making great red wine from the merlot grape, complemented by cabernet franc and a small amount of cabernet sauvignon, the most important variety of the Medoc, was recognized only later. Saint-Émilion classified its wines for the first time in 1955 and, unlike the immutable Médoc, it has updated the list every 10 years or so.

That more or less worked until 2006, when chateaus that had been downgraded decided to sue. The courts found anomalies and threw out the classification. When Saint-Émilion gave it another try, last year, the authorities were expected to play it safe to avoid another fiasco. Instead they did something radical.

True, they demoted only a handful of chateaus, leaving 82 in the classification. This time it was the promotions that sent a powerful message.

Two chateaus, Angélus and Pavie, were elevated to the top category, Premier Grand Cru Classé A, placing them alongside the two famous names that had occupied this position alone since the beginning, Cheval Blanc and Ausone. Two other estates, Valandraud and La Mondotte, were lifted from the ranks of Saint-Émilion commoners and anointed to the second-highest level, Premier Grand Cru Classé B, hurdling over the first step, Grand Cru Classé.

All four of these estates, along with many of the others that were promoted, are owned by newcomers to Saint-Émilion, or by longer established proprietors who have embraced new methods of winemaking in an effort to lift the quality and the profile of their wines.

In the world of wine, “modern” is a loaded term, indicating a style that, some critics say, reflects technical expertise rather than faith to the “terroir”: the notion, sacred in France, that wine is an expression of the land on which it is grown.

By rewarding ambitious proprietors, the authorities in Saint-Émilion seemed to be saying that human hands and scientific knowledge played just as important a role in the quality of the wine as the mysterious influence of the land. This did not go down well with everyone.

“In the United States, people are happy if you succeed,” said Jean-Luc Thunevin of Château Valandraud. “In France there is always jealousy. Twenty-five years ago, I was nothing. Now I am rich. Of course that makes a lot of noise.”

The newcomers are epitomized by Mr. Thunevin. A “pied noir” — an ethnic Frenchman born in Algeria when it was still a French colony — he eventually settled in the Bordeaux area.

Although he had no formal training in winemaking, Mr. Thunevin and his wife, Muriel, acquired a few hectares of vines in Saint-Émilion in 1989. They became Château Valandraud; the wine was made in the garage of the Thunevins’ house, giving rise to the label “garagistes,” which was later applied widely to new Saint-Émilion wines.

The garage wines were different in substance as well as style. Driven by an obsessive pursuit of quality, Mr. Thunevin lowered the yields in his vineyards, and aged his wine in 100 percent new oak barrels. The result was a dark, concentrated wine of great intensity and complexity, which quickly won praise from prominent critics like Robert Parker.

As the garage wines soared in price, more established chateaus began to borrow some of their techniques, especially those owned by new proprietors. These included Gérard Perse, a former bicycling champion and supermarket entrepreneur who bought Pavie in 1998.

Pavie was briefly the center of one of the more celebrated brouhahas in wine criticism, when two of the most influential wine journalists, Mr. Parker and Jancis Robinson, who writes a column in the Financial Times, disagreed vehemently over the 2003 vintage. Ms. Robinson called it “unappetizing,” “overripe” and “ridiculous,” while Mr. Parker praised it as an “off-the-charts effort.”

Some critics complained that the modern techniques masked the terroir-influenced diversity of Saint-Émilion wines. Certainly some of the early garage efforts were overdone, with a black hue more suited to Port than to table wine. But many of the garage wines, as well as revamped classics like Pavie, have evolved in the direction of greater elegance and individuality.

“It’s nonsense to say the wines all taste the same,” Mr. Thunevin said. “It’s true that they are cleaner and better-made now. It used to be that one could recognize the different wines by their faults.”

In Saint-Émilion, you don’t need to be a newcomer to embrace new thinking. The family of Hubert de Boüard has been making wine here for eight generations. Rather than growing complacent, he has gone on a quest to improve the already high quality of Angélus, even introducing certain methods from Bordeaux’s archrival, Burgundy.

That has paid off. Château Angélus from great vintages like 2000, 2005 and 2009 is among the most profound young Bordeaux I have tasted.

In addition to progressive winemaking, Mr. de Boüard also has embraced new kinds of marketing, a word that makes many in the Bordeaux old guard shudder. One of those is movie product placement; Angélus has made cameo appearances in three dozen films, including “Casino Royale” in 2006 and “Passion” last year. This has helped the chateau reach new consumers in Asia, who now account for 55 percent of sales, up from 15 percent in 2005, Mr. de Boüard said.

As for the promotion to Premier Grand Cru Classé A status — that resulted in an immediate increase of 10 percent to 20 percent in the price of Angélus, depending on the vintage, from already rather hefty levels (the 2009 sells for around €350 a bottle). It also caused some grumbling among the existing top tier of Bordeaux chateaus, which realized that they would have to share the spotlight.

“Ninety-five percent of the people were happy, but there was some jealousy,” Mr. de Boüard said. “It’s dangerous for people to think that they are in a position where nothing can ever change.” While the elite mostly suffered in silence, several chateaus demoted under the new classification decided to sue. One of them, Château Croque-Michotte, complained of “technical errors” in the assessment process.

“Too many errors were committed and the regulations were not respected,” Lucile Carle of Croque-Michotte told the French wine magazine Terre de Vins.

Some of the criteria used to rank the chateaus do seem less than objective. Among other things, properties were graded on their reputation in the marketplace, as well as the prices that their wines already fetch — a bit of a Catch-22, given that one of the factors in the price of a wine is its ranking in the classification.

But the authorities went to great lengths to try to avoid a repeat of the 2006 debacle, bringing in outside tasters and auditors to try to ensure transparency. Regardless of what happens in the courts in the coming months, it would be a shame if the broader messages in the 2012 classification were lost.

“It’s a positive sign when we see that people can go up and down,” said Stephan von Neipperg, a relative newcomer to Bordeaux, having arrived in the 1980s. Two of his Saint-Émilion estates, Canon-La Gaffelière and La Mondotte, were promoted in the 2012 classification, the latter by two notches. “It’s like playing football. At the end of the day, you have to accept the referee’s decision.”