Old Vines Spotlight: Pre-Phylloxera 1860 vines at Château de la Vieille Chapelle

A kind of collective madness took hold of wine growers in 1870s France as they battled against Phylloxera. No one can blame them, and maybe today we can even understand a little better the helplessness they felt in the face of a destructive force that they didn’t fully understand.

Some buried live toads under affected vines to draw out the poison that seemed to be killing their crops, others tried goats’ urine or garlic peel. A popular remedy was to pump toxic and foul-smelling insecticides into the roots – a few even tried a diluted version of Sarin, a chemical that would become infamous 120 years later with the Tokyo subway attack. When none of these worked, many producers simply uprooted entire vineyards and instead bottled wine imported from entirely different regions, desperately passing it off as their own.

Until the practice of grafting French vines onto American rootstock took hold, there was only really one seemingly-crackpot solution that actually worked, at least besides planting in sandy soils (a solution that vastly altered the character of the wines even if physically possible), and that was flooding the vines with enough water to drown the Phylloxera louse.

Flooding artificially was complicated, expensive, and impractical, but very few places, even in Bordeaux with its oceanic climate and two major rivers, were able to guarantee natural flooding, year after year. This is why in the 19th century the palus marshlands along the Garonne and Dordogne rivers – that today are almost invariably outside of the appellation controlée limits – became highly sought after for planting, even though the water-logged soils rarely allowed grapes to reach full maturity. As grafting won out, older vineyards were pulled up and replaced, meaning that truly old vines – those that reach 100, 150 or even 200 years of age that you can still find routinely in places untouched by Phylloxera like Barossa – are rare in Bordeaux.

All of which means, you’d imagine, that the 0.33ha of 1860s vines that you can at Château de la Vieille Chapelle would be celebrated as historic treasures.  Even more so as they comprise an array of rare varieties that barely exist elsewhere in the region. Instead, until just over a decade ago, they were pretty much entirely forgotten about, routinely used as part of the blend for the main estate wine, with the Castets, Bouchales and Mancin grapes remaining unrecognised, mixed into the blend with Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.

You’ll get a clue as to why if you manage to visit. The estate – named after an 11th century chapel that was home to Benedictine monks until the French Revolution – is approached by a low-lying single road that takes you into the heart of Lugon-Ile du Carney, a commune that was once entirely separated from the main body of the Right Bank by a tributary of the Dordogne river, and that can still be cut off at certain times of the year. It’s a place where all residents once owned their own barges or flat-bottomed gabare boats to ensure year-round access, and was a place of welcome for the boatmen who used to ship barrels of wine up and down the Dordogne.

Dominated by forests, marshes and swamps – watch out for mosquitos in high summer here – it’s a peaceful place to spend a few hours or even days (the château doubles as a popular guest house), slightly suspended from the rest of Bordeaux even though only 15 minutes from the city of Libourne, all too easy to overlook in favour of the bigger names of Pomerol and St Emilion.

In the decades since Phylloxera, areas that flood regularly have hardly been the most highly prized for viticulture, and the generations of owners before Frédéric and Fabienne Mallier arrived in 2006 perhaps focused on the challenges of making wine in this spot rather than the viticultural treasures that they were cultivating. In fact the most successful previous owner of La Vieille Chapelle, who built much of the present estate, was William Walton, a hydraulic engineer from Leeds, England.

Walton’s father John Slate Walton, also a hydraulic engineer, and had moved to Bordeaux in the 19th century precisely to capitalize on the desperation of winemakers looking to flood their vineyards during Phylloxera. Born in 1880, William learnt from his father’s experience and founded his own water management company, W Walton et Cie, in 1910, the same year that he bought La Vieille Chapelle. He installed a pumping station on the site to control the water that is so abundant here, and used it to irrigate the many other crops that were planted in the area. The drainage system that he put in place, with clapper boards that prevent the water flooding the land in an uncontrolled manner, is still effective.

It is this, as you have no doubt realised, that is the secret to the ungrafted pre-Phylloxera vines that remain on the site.

‘When we arrived in 2006,’ Mallier told me during a visit this summer, ‘it was clear that one particular plot, that lay right alongside the Dordogne river, was unusual, not least because the trellising method was cordon royat (where the trunk of the vine extends horizontally along a wire, yielding shoots over many years) rather than the more typical double guyot that you find over most of Bordeaux. It’s less productive than guyot, making around 20% less grapes, but it doesn’t exhaust the vines’.

Fascinated by the difference in the flavours and shape of the vines at this spot, in 2009 they used DNA analysis to try to identify a small number of vines that were most distinct – and found that the vines they had thought were Merlot were in fact the Bouchalès grape. A few years later, they carried out a full study of the 400 vines in the same plot, all non-grafted, 19th century vines, and discovered 11 forgotten varieties including one unidentified hybrid, including Bouchalès, Mancin, Cot (Malbec), Castets, Carménère and Péloursin. They are almost certainly among the oldest in Bordeaux.

‘We’re interested in exploring whether these old grape varieties might be useful in the 21st century fight against climate change,’ Mallier said.

‘We already know that intensive production is damaging soils and vines, and it’s worth questioning whether grafting is adding to the increase in vine disease.’

Since 2016, Mallier has been carrying out massal selection and replanting across two hectares, also ungrafted, alongside the original plot, with a field blend now being produced from the grapes. Even so, it remains a difficult place to farm. Organic since 2008, certified in 2013 and biodynamic certified since 2017, in 2021 they lost 50% of their crop to mildew, as they had in 2018, and the low-lying land is heavily susceptible to frost, meaning 2017 was also extremely tough. In good years the production is 45,000 bottles, but it drops down to 5,000 in bad. Much of their regular income comes from the guest house that they run – meaning the travel difficulties of the past two years have weighed particularly heavily.

Before moving here, Mallier lived in Shanghai for 10 years as a consultant in the energy industry, and Frédéric kept this as a second job for the first few years after he bought La Vieille Chapelle (‘on the advice of pretty much every single person I asked’, he says with a rueful smile. ‘We had a life before and we may have a life after but despite all the challenges, I know I would have regretted not trying more than I would regret going bankrupt’).

Let’s hope he continues to feel that way, because this is an amazing estate, with a fascinating – if confusing at times – array of wines produced. The exact blends, names and labels change each year (as does the oak regime, with some years barrel-aged, the following entirely in cement tanks), but they are worth taking the time to get to know. Look out for C’est Bon Le Vin, a 65% Bouchalès, 25% Merlot and 10% other rare grapes blend that was made in 2008 and again in 2018 (the first time they believed the ungrafted vines to be Merlot and Petit Verdot). It’s excellent quality, a wine that at first seems unfussy and easy to love then builds in power and stops you in your tracks.

The Bouchalès-Merlot blend is also excellent, deeply peppery with raspberry, olive paste and baked earth notes, vinified in cement vats and then aged in 400-litre, neutral barrels, made with no added sulphur, as is the Les Merlot de Baudet, from 100% massal selection ungrafted Merlot vines. Small details also show the importance of these grapes for adapting to an increasingly warm climate – the 100% Bouchalès, for example, is naturally low in alcohol, 11% in 2018 compared to 14% for the rest of the range,

What is certain is that Mallier is somebody who is not interested in easy answers.

‘I want to understand if it is possible to live with phylloxera’,  he says. ‘Clearly the intensive production of today’s wine industry is damaging soils and vines. Grafting is not only nonsense, but is probably the origin of the degeneration of the vines and the susceptibility to diseases like mildew. We hope to find out if our methods of cultivation, and our rare varieties with their roots in the 19th century, can help the 21st century challenge of climate change’.

www.chateau-de-la-vieille-chapelle.com

Stories about many others of the world’s greatest old vines can be found here. https://www.oldvines.org/