Margaux's Rising Star

Posted 03/14/2008 at 12:24 PM by Ben

Last night's French Wine Society tasting of the wines of the Margaux and Pauillac communes of Bordeaux revealed a rising star in the Margaux pecking order -- Chateau Rauzan-Segla. It trounced my sentimental favorite, Chateau Palmer, and and also beat out a number of well regarded wines from Pauillac.

The 2003 Rauzan-Segla was overwhelmingly voted the wine of the evening by the 30 or so tasters at the event held at the Sofitel Hotel in downtown Washington, DC. The 2000 Rauzan-Segla finished a close second, just ahead of the formidable 2000 Chateau Pontet-Canet, a Pauillac. The 2004 Chateau Palmer barely registered a single first-place vote.

But my purpose here is not to diss Chateau Palmer, which simply had an off night, but but to praise Chateau Rauzan-Segla. This property has had a rough road to recovery.

In the 1855 classification of the chateaux of the Medoc, Chateau Rauzan-Segla was ranked just below Chateau Mouton-Rothschild as a second growth. In 1973, when Mouton-Rothschild was elevated to first growth to take its rightful place in the same classification with Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, Chateau Latour, and Chateau Margaux, in theory Chateau Rauzan-Segla became the "first among the seconds" in the 1855 hierarchy. But that was pretty much a joke, since at that juncture in time Rauzan-Segla, and its sister property, Chateau Rauzan-Gassies, were making wines that could only charitably be described as mediocre.

The big turnaround for Chateau Rauzan-Segla came a few years ago when it was purchased by the owners of Chanel, who promptly installed Englishman John Kolassa, formerly of Chateau Latour, as the man in charge. [Link to our interview with John Kolassa.] He improved production techniques and made subtle changes to the winemaking.

That appears to be all that was needed, since as the 1855 classification recognized, Rauzan-Segla sits on some of the finest soil of Bordeaux. It is a neighbor of first growth Chateau Margaux, and of arch rival Chateau Palmer, considered a super second even though it is in fact officially classified as a third growth. All that Kolassa really needed to do was to allow is great to war to express itself.

That's exactly what happened last night. Both the 2003 and 2000 vintages of Rauzan-Segla presented themselves as what I would call a Margaux among Margaux's. By this I mean that they exhibited to a wonderfully extreme degree the classic Margaux character of sauve elegance. A Margaux wine will rarely knock you off your feet with power and masses of big fleshy fruit, the way a wine from Napa Valley or perhaps Pomerol might. Rather, it should seduce the palate and olfactory system with heady aromas and flavors of violets, spring flowers, fresh cherries and berries, and new earth. This is what both the 2000 and 2003 Rauzan-Segla did with great elan.

There are some who maintain that this style of elegance is going out of fashion in favor of a bigger, heartier styled demanded by today's consumers, who are used to the big, fleshy overtly fruity style of New World wines from California and Australia. The results of last night tasting certainly suggest otherwise. And to my way of thinking, that's a delightful discovery.

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