Can Château d’Yquem save Sauternes?

You may think me crazy but I would suggest buying fine Sauternes now.

There’s no shortage of it and it is so unfashionable currently that prices are ridiculously modest in view of the difficulty of making it — far cheaper than equivalent red bordeaux. In my long career I’ve seen so many reversals of trends that I feel Sauternes and its neighbour Barsac are bound to find favour again. And because the best last almost for ever, it doesn’t really matter how long this takes. Below, I make some concrete suggestions for possible investments.

The one exception is the most highly regarded Sauternes of all, the property rated the finest in all Bordeaux in the famous 1855 classification, Ch d’Yquem. Its wines are priced at almost 10 times as much as those of its neighbours so, while they’re outstanding and almost invariably thrilling, they cannot be considered underpriced (even if, thanks to the whims of fashion, they are very much less expensive than red Bordeaux first growths).

Yquem may feel justified in its marked premium over its classed growth neighbours because since 1999 it has been owned by LVMH, the luxury goods company well-versed in commanding high prices. Perhaps it’s also because it literally looks down on them all. It is a grand, fortified building on top of a hill from which you can see Chx Rieussec, Suduiraut, Sigalas Rabaud, Rabaud Promis, Lafaurie Peyraguey, de Rayne Vigneau, Clos Haut-Peyraguey and Guiraud.

From 1593 until the LVMH purchase, Yquem had been in the same family, first the Sauvages and then, from 1785 when Joséphine de Sauvage d’Yquem married, the Lur-Saluces.

An English edition of a 2023 biography of Joséphine, whose husband died only a few years into their marriage, has just been published by Flammarion and very fascinating it is too. It outlines how she fought to make her wine the very best it could be and introduced real innovation in making and selling Sauternes. She did so many years before Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Dona Antónia Ferreira, whose achievements as young widows in champagne and port, respectively, are better known.

At the beginning of the 19th century, when Joséphine was in her early thirties, she identified the key ingredient in making top quality sweet white bordeaux, a strange mould called Botrytis cinerea, noble rot colloquially. She noticed that the best wines were made from fully ripe grapes that, apparently randomly, had shrivelled on the vine and were covered in a rather disgusting-looking sort of grey dust.

This special fungus magically concentrates both sugars and acids in pale-skinned grapes and does much more besides. Joséphine and her steward Jean Garros would not have known the complex chemical and physical reactions within the grape triggered by an attack of noble rot, but they realised that they would make even better wine if they sent pickers through the vineyard multiple times to pick only the affected bunches, or even individual grapes, each time.

This still happens today and is now standard practice in such Sauternes properties as can afford it, although few can financially justify such fastidiousness and as many passes through the vineyard as Ch d’Yquem. For their 106 hectares of Sémillon with 30 per cent Sauvignon Blanc vines in production, they need up to 140 seasonal local pickers to be on call for as many as seven different passages through the vineyard. The harvest now starts in August and can extend into November. In 1985, the last grapes were picked on December 19.

The pickers have to be available seven days a week and are paid only for the days on which they pick, when they also get breakfast and lunch. They may have to work on a Sunday, when they get choux à la crème as recompense, according to Lorenzo Pasquini, the 36-year-old estate manager recently promoted to CEO.

This is highly specialised work for which careful training is needed. When I spent a day there last May, Pasquini told me the average age of the pickers is 60, that more than a third of them are over 70 and more than half are women. He’s trying to recruit about 10 per cent more new pickers each year but it can’t be easy, even though each picker is given a bottle of Yquem.

Pasquini, a young Italian who has arrived at what seems like the job of his dreams via making wine in California and Argentina, is in charge of a major revitalisation programme that includes extensive building work. Much of the new building is devoted to welcoming visitors. The first thing you encounter on Yquem’s smart website is an invitation to choose a formula for a visit, from €70 per person for nothing more than a taste in the glamorous tasting room up to €300 for a private visit followed by a taste of the 2015, 2010 and 2005 vintages. The size of the pours is not specified.

There’s a high-tech presentation of the renovated estate and all sorts of refinements to the recipe which, according to Pasquini, “is the most minimal in the world” as all the selection has been done in the field. They have been reducing the time spent in barrel from three to two years and working on the aromatic potential.

In the great wide world outside Bordeaux, a programme was instituted in 2022 to encourage selected restaurants, wine bars and clubs to serve Yquem by the glass. I’d dearly love to see more wine drinkers enjoy the special qualities of truly fine sweet wine, but to judge from what’s available on the market, an ever-higher proportion of grapes grown in the Sauternes region are made into dry wines.

Most châteaux there, depressed by the lack of demand for their sweet wines and mindful of the cost of producing them, are developing dry wines from their Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon grapes. Some of them are even lobbying for a special Sauternes Sec appellation for them. Early versions used to be a bit heavy and unappetising but the quality has been improving.

Yquem’s dry version, called Ygrec after the French for the letter Y, was launched in 1959, shocking the Sauternais at the time. Initially it was really heavy, made from grapes picked at the end of the harvest and with a suggestion of botrytis — truly a sort of dryish Sauternes. Today it’s made from grapes picked in August before they reach full ripeness. From 2001 they have increased the proportion of Sémillon again so that it was 40 per cent in the very lively 2022.

Pasquini is convinced that 2022 comes in the middle of an exceptional trio of vintages, 2021, 2022 and 2023, as good as 1988, 1989 and 1990 — and even 1948, 1949 and 1950. Might this most recent trio serve to change a few minds?

Jancis Robinson will be speaking at the FT Weekend Festival on September 6 at Kenwood House Gardens, London. For passes go to: ft.com/festival