Rieussec Reinvented

Château Rieussec has always occupied a particularly special place in the Lafite Rothschild universe.

Both the current technical director of Lafite, Eric Kohler, and his predecessor Charles Chevallier, spent their early winemaking years at the Sauternes château, owned by the Rothschild family since 1984. Chevallier has told me many times that the skills of patience, the importance of individual grape selection, and and a steadfast attention to detail in every single row of vines, are never so needed as in the vineyards of Sauternes. Both ascribe their successful approaches with Lafite to the lessons learned with the great sweet white of Rieussec, where a successful vintage is always hard-earned and can never be relied upon.

Everything is different in Sauternes. Where rot is feared in the red wine vineyards that take up 90% of viticultural land in Bordeaux, in this tiny corner to the south of the region it is looked for and celebrated – as long as it’s the right kind of rot at the right moment of year. Where a hot dry August and September is prized in most of Bordeaux, here it’s anxiety-inducing, as overly dry weather means an absence of the crucial early morning mists that kick off the action of  botrytis cinerea or noble rot on the grapes of Sauternes’ vineyards. And the very thing that makes noble rot so precious – that concentration of flavours when the rot eats through the skins, allowing the water in the juice to evaporate and leaving sugar behind – also means yields are tiny, a fraction of what you will find for red wines, barely a single glass of wine from a full vine’s worth of berries.

And even when everything goes right, when the skills required at every step have been perfectly executed, the harvest successfully navigated and the gloriously nuanced, indulgent and complex sweet wines are delivered to market, the response tends to be more of a shrug than applause. Because the reality is that this most artisanal of wines, once celebrated by kings and tsars, a wine where every single movement during the growing season has to be carried out by hand and no short cuts are either possible or allowed, has failed to connect to its market for many years.

The question of a way back for Sauternes has been debated many times, but Rieussec – with its 85 hectares that border directly with Château d’Yquem – is in no mood to wait. Certainly not now it is being overseen by the current estate director Jean de Roquefeuil and Saskia de Rothschild, the 6th generation of the Rothschild family in Bordeaux and the first one to live full time in the region. Both are in their mid 30s, part of a young team at the Sauternes property that is ready for reinvention.

There had been rumours for a while that Rieussec was getting a radical overhaul, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I drove up at the property last week. I already knew that all the Rothschild estates are taking environmentalism seriously – L’Evangile is already certified organic, Lafite Rothschild on its way, with an agroforestry programme in progress that is seeing them pulling up 3ha of vines to replant with trees and hedgerows that will be studded among the Pauillac gravels.

Here too, environmental concerns are top of mind, and the new label and bottle that I am here to see is quickly underlined to be part of a major rethink on how to lessen their environmental footprint. 2021 is the first year of full conversion to organics for Rieussec, with certification started as of August this year and expected to be completed in 2024.

The new bottle, in turn, is conceived with an environmental agenda in mind. It might look like a radical departure – an opaque bottle with a Matisse-style single block-colour crown on the front, in bright yellow rather than the usual gold that we associate with Sauternes – but the reasoning behind the design is refreshingly down-to-earth.

‘Fully clear bottles, although used widely across Sauternes to show the colour of the sweet wine within, can never be made with fully recycled glass,’ says de Rothschild. ‘This bottle, made from something called Wild Glass, is 95% recycled, and will be 100% within the next few years’.

It is also satisfyingly solid to hold – and functional. The cork that the bottle comes with is designed to be removed on opening, then immediately replaced with a spherical hermetically-sealed cork that can be easily taken off and on, and strung around the neck of the bottle (‘we want to make it clear that the wine can be kept in the fridge for up to a month’).  The back label is also designed to be easily removed, for the bottle to be kept and re-used. The people responsible for the design are a Swiss agency called Big Game, who have worked in the past with brands such as Alessi, Muji and French furniture store Moustache, and you see plenty of that quirky, clean-line aesthetic on display.

Can Rieussec offer a way forward for the entire category? They have their work cut out for them if that’s the plan. According to CIVB figures, production has dropped 24% in volume and 15% in surface area in 20 years, as the producers react to lower market demand. Sauternes is the only region outside of the Médoc (and Haut-Brion) to be recognised in the 1855 ranking, and the only whites, and yet the average price of the wines hasn’t budged in decades, watching all the while as the prices of the 1855 classified reds have raced away, ever upwards. As a sombre illustration of this, the average price in 1983 for a bottle of top (classified or equivalent) red Bordeaux was €12 and for Sauternes €7.70. By 2009 that had become €147.92 for the reds, and €29.63 for Sauternes.

In contrast, this cheerful, inviting new bottle seems to be brushing aside all that bad news. There is no question that it has impact –and it’s helped by the fact that the 2019 vintage is a brilliant one at the estate. I think they could go further. They are intending to bottle the entire production only in this one size (75cl) whereas I still think half bottles are important for Sauternes, and can already imagine how beautiful a mini version of this design would look. But it’s an excellent move in my opinion, and one that will get people talking, which in itself is a success.

‘We needed to reinvent ourselves at Rieussec’, is how Saskia de Rothschild puts it, ‘and for that we needed to break a few rules.’

Read my tasting note – Château Rieussec Sauternes 1855 1er Cru 2019

Read more about Château Rieussec