Vieux Château Certan tasted from 1923 to 2020. A slightly shorter version of this article is published by the Financial Times. See A century of Vieux Château Certan for much more detail.
Earlier this month, as this year’s Bordeaux en primeur campaign petered out, blighted by inadequate discounts on the expensive 2022s so that it is easy to find mature and better vintages at the same price as the embryonic 2023s, 11 of us wine writers sat in a handsome manor house in Flanders tasting our way back to the vintage exactly a century older, 1923, of one of the most famous Pomerols.
We were celebrating the centenary of the acquisition of Vieux Château Certan by the Thienpont family, Belgian wine merchants. They have been supplying Belgium with fine wine since 1842 from extensive cellars beneath the house, bottling many of them there too. With a barbecue supper after the two-day tasting, the four of us tasters left were served a 1935 Richebourg bottled in those cellars outside the little village of Etikhove (usefully for shipments during the war, with its own railway station). On the label, dominated by a rather fine drawing of the vine-covered house, the name Georges Thienpont is considerably bigger than that of the supplier, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. (Georges persuaded the Nazis to use the house as a hospital rather than a headquarters, thereby saving the cellar.)
Vieux Château Certan 1923, still going strong a hundred years later, was so charming that Georges Thienpont was persuaded by his wife to buy the estate in 1924, having acquired Château Troplong Mondot in the next-door appellation St-Émilion three years earlier. These two appellations on the right bank of the Dordogne had nothing like the réclame of appellations on the left bank of the Gironde such as Margaux and Pauillac until the late twentieth century, and in the mid 1930s in the aftermath of the financial crash, Georges sold Troplong Mondot, the more extensive and presumably more valuable property.
It was only in the 1950s that the British merchants Averys and Harveys tried to persuade their customers that right-bank wines were not beyond the pale. My FT predecessor Edmund Penning-Rowsell always viewed even Petrus, the most revered Pomerol and usually all-Merlot, as something of a parvenu.
Vieux Château Certan has 14 ha (34.59 acres) of vines and a highly distinctive varietal make-up, with much more Cabernet – both fragrant Cabernet Franc and some of the tannic left-bank Cabernet Sauvignon – and less sweet Merlot than most Pomerols, so the wine is a gift for lovers of backbone in their wines.
VCC, as it is widely known, was long considered a serious contender for second-best Pomerol, and in the 1980s the Thienponts came to challenge the supremacy of Petrus in the form of a wine even rarer than Petrus called Le Pin created by Jacques Thienpont in 1979 from a tiny plot of Merlot along the road from VCC. Le Pin has been in such demand, fetching thousands of pounds a bottle, that over the years it has been transformed from being made behind a family laundry room to having its own smart modern premises.
The family have since spread their wings on the right bank, establishing L’If in neighbouring St-Émilion and L’Hêtre in up-and-coming Castillon a little further east, each run by a member of the current generation of Thienponts. Château Puygueraud in Francs nearby has long been in this extensive, male-dominated family.
VCC remains the domain of Jacques’ cousin Alexandre, who made the wine between 1986 and 2011, 'succeeded by his well-travelled winemaker son Guillaume'. Jacques and his Master of Wine wife Fiona Morrison meanwhile commute between Pomerol and Etikhove, running both Le Pin and the family’s Belgian wine business. It was their idea to celebrate the centenary.
Alexandre, always more reticent, eventually decided to join the party, as did Roy Richards, who, as co-founder of UK wine importer Richards Walford, had been importing and drinking the Thienponts’ wines since 1981, in the early years of Le Pin, when his business partner Mark Walford met Jacques’ and Alexandre’s uncle, Gérard Thienpont, then running the Belgian wine business, in a restaurant in the Loire Valley. Richards subsequently enjoyed many a bibulous dinner at Etikhove with Gérard until his death in 1995, and so had intimate knowledge of many of the glorious vintages served at the centenary celebration. He claimed currently to be drinking VCC 1948 and reckoned now was awfully early to be tackling even the relatively early-maturing 2009.
Almost all the bottles we tasted had been kept throughout their long lives in the Etikhove cellars of the house shown above, so authenticity and dubious storage was never in question, a rarity in today’s fine-wine world. Although, as someone remarked, ‘Why counterfeit VCC when there’s so much more money to be made faking Petrus?’ (Petrus costs in the thousands per bottle.)
Virtually all the bottles were in excellent condition. We had to abandon both bottles of 1986 because of cork taint. Our particular bottles of 1952 and 1959 were disappointing and the 1925, 1936, 1958, all notoriously poor vintages, were showing their age. But, to the delight of some of us, VCC produced outstanding wine in other vintages with a less-than-stunning reputation such as 2017, 2011, 2002, 1987 and 1942.
Quite apart from its heavy Cabernet influence, refreshingly long-lived VCC is distinguished by its impressively old vines, some planted as long ago as 1932, whose deep roots have helped them withstand the recent onslaught of drought. And Alexandre, responsible for winemaking during the era when his neighbours seemed to be chasing ripeness at the expense of subtlety, withstood that trend, thereby almost certainly prolonging his wines’ lives. He confessed at the tasting, ‘I felt I was labouring in the desert during the blockbuster era’. We were not served a wine from the heatwave vintage of 2003 from that time because it’s a vintage Alexandre ‘refutes’.
Summing up the tasting, our host, the usually taciturn Jacques, surprised and relieved there were so few disappointments among the 57 vintages tasted, became quite emotional, describing the event as an extremely rare opportunity to examine the legacy of a single family and a single property over 100 years. His son Georges helped serve the wines with Jacques’ nephew Alexander De Raeymaeker, and is expected to take over Le Pin eventually, once he has completed his oenology degree in Adelaide. He is already practising on his own Chardonnay vineyard there so the future seems assured.
Exceptional VCCs
I have included only those from this century that I scored at least 18 out of 20. But note that there are few disappointments.
2020 (14.5%) £388 Hedonism
2019 (14.5%) £335 Mumbles
2017 (14.5%) £245 Nemo, £249 Mumbles, £250 BBC Good Food Wine Club
2016 (14.5%) £390 Nemo
2015 (15%) £320 Huntsworth Wine Co
2012 (14%) £190 Nemo
2011 (13.5%) £180 Nemo, a bargain
2010 (14.5%) £410 Nemo, £425 The Perfect Bottle
2009 (14%) £299 The Perfect Bottle, a relative bargain
2006 (13.5%) £210 Fraziers Wine
2005 (13.5%) £279 The Perfect Bottle, £290 Nemo
2002 (13.5%) £164.95 T Wright, a bargain
2001 (13%) £390 Brunswick Fine Wines
Members of JancisRobinson.com have access to tasting notes, scores and attempted drinking dates for all 57 wines in A century of Vieux Château Certan. For international stockists, see Wine-Searcher.com.