Château Marojallia sold to Marquis de Terme

Château Marojallia, owned by Domaines Philippe Percheron, has been sold to neighbouring Margaux property, and 1855 4th Growth, Château Marquis de Terme.

It means that the 2022 vintage will be the last year for the wine to be bottled from this 6ha site, because the vines will now go into Marquis de Terme (the brand name has not been sold though, so it may well turn up somewhere else, but fans of this particular wine should get hold of the 2022).

Marojallia – the name is Latin for Margaux – is an estate with a short-lived but fascinating history. The site was originally bought, back in 1999, from a 74-year old retired vigneron called Roger Rex, although it had once been owned by Bernard Ginestet, former owner of Château Margaux and longtime mayor of the village.

It came with no winery but with two hectares of 60-year old vines that were being rented out. Porcheron immediately took them back, found a small winemaking space in the nearby village of Arsac and enlisted Jean-Luc Thunevin’s oenologist wife Murielle Anraud as consultant – at a time when they were the leading lights in the garagiste movement on the Right Bank. The clear intention was to shake things up.

Yields were dropped to under 20hl/h, less than half of the usual crop for the Left Bank, new oak was turned up to 100%, and the first vintage was released at a higher price that its First Growth neighbour Château Margaux. Jancis Robinson described it as, ‘a firebomb lobbed into the salons of traditional Bordeaux’.

Things look very different from the point of view of 2023, with the garagiste movement well and truly over, and the First Growths seeing the price of their land continuing to draw away from even the rest of classified Bordeaux. In recent vintages Marojallia has been sold for around 20-25% of the consumer price of Château Margaux. The Thunevins only consulted here until 2003, when they handed over to Médoc-expert Christophe Coupez, and the Michel Rolland laboratory under Julien Viaud.

I last interviewed Marojallia cellar master Sebastien Valette a few years ago, when he told me,

‘Sales haven’t always been easy. At first we sold almost entirely in America, then Russia, and are now trying to be more evenly spread across markets. Political events such as the Gulf War affected us strongly as a new brand without established distribution.’

Clearly more recent political and economic events have not helped, and it is a shame to see such a firebrand name return to history – but good news potentially for the appellation of Margaux to have investment in two prime pieces of wine tourism real estate.