One hundred years since the acquisition of Vieux Château Certan and hundred-year-old wine

Earlier this month, as this year’s Bordeaux en primeur campaign came to an end in favour of the 2023 vintage, 11 of us wine writers were sat in a beautiful manor house in the Flemish village of Etikhove, trying to revisit a vintage exactly a hundred years older: 1923, one of the most famous Pomerols.

We celebrated the centenary of the acquisition of Vieux Château Certan by the Thienpont family, Belgian wine merchants. Since 1842, they have supplied Belgium with excellent wine from the extensive cellars beneath the house, and bottle much of it there as well.

After a two-day tasting over a barbecue dinner, the four tasters were served 1935 Richebourg wine bottled in these cellars. On the label, which is dominated by a rather nice drawing of a house covered with vines, the name Georges Thienpont is much larger than the name of the supplier, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.

The 1923 Vieux Château Certan, which is still going strong a century later, was so charming that Georges Thienpont was persuaded by his wife to buy the estate in 1924, after having acquired Ch Troplong Mondot in the neighboring appellation St- Émilion. These two appellations on the right bank of the Gironde had nothing in common with the réclame appellations on the left bank such as Margaux and Pauillac until the end of the 20th century, and in the 1930s, after the financial crisis, Georges sold Troplong Mondot.

It was not until the 1950s that British merchants Averys and Harveys tried to convince their customers that Right Bank wines were not alone. My FT predecessor, Edmund Penning-Rowsell, was not convinced. He had always regarded even Petrus, the most respected Pomerol and usually entirely Merlot, as something of an upstart.

Vieux Château Certan has 14 hectares of vines and a very distinctive varietal composition, with much more Cabernet, both the fragrant Cabernet Franc and the tannic Left Bank Cabernet Sauvignon, as well as less sweet Merlot than most Pomerols.

VCC, as it is commonly known, had long been considered a serious contender for second best Pomerol, and in the 1980s the Thienponts began to challenge Petrus’ supremacy with an even rarer wine called Le Pin, created by Jacques Thienpont in 1979 from a tiny plot of Merlot down the road from VCC. Le Pin was in such demand, fetching thousands of pounds a bottle, that over the years it was transformed from a factory behind the family laundry into its own elegant, modern headquarters.

Since then, the family has spread its wings across the Right Bank, establishing L’If in neighbouring St-Émilion and L’Hêtre in the growing Castillon a little further east, each run by a member of the current generation of Thienponts. Ch Puygueraud in nearby Francs has long been a member of this vast, male-dominated family.

VCC remains the domain of Jacques’ cousin Alexandre, who made the wine from 1986 to 2011, and was succeeded by his son, the well-travelled winemaker Guillaume. Jacques and his wife Fiona Morrison, Master of Wine, 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 reserved, eventually decided to join the party, as did Roy Richards, who, as co-founder of the British wine importer Richards Walford, had been importing and drinking Thienpont wines since the early days of Le Pin, when his business partner Mark Walford met Jacques and Alexandre’s uncle, Gérard Thienpont, then running a Belgian wine business, in a restaurant in the Loire. Richards subsequently enjoyed many hearty dinners at Etikhove with Gérard until his death in 1995, giving him intimate knowledge of many of the great vintages served during the centenary celebrations.

Almost all the bottles we tasted had been stored in Etikhove cellars their entire lives, so the authenticity and storage conditions were beyond any doubt, which is rare in today’s world of fine wines.

Virtually all bottles were in excellent condition. We had to abandon both bottles from 1986 due to contamination with the cork. Our 1952 and 1959 bottles were disappointing, and the 1925, 1936, 1958, all notoriously poor vintages, were showing their age. However, to the delight of some of us, VCC has produced excellent wine in other vintages with less than stellar reputations, such as 2017, 2011, 2002, 1987, 1942, 1940, and even this 1923.

Quite apart from the strong Cabernet influence, the refreshingly long-lived VCC boasts impressively old vines, some planted as far back as 1932, whose deep roots have helped them survive a recent bout of drought. And Alexandre, responsible for winemaking in an era when his neighbors seemed to be chasing maturity at the expense of subtlety, has bucked the trend, almost certainly extending the life of his wines in the process. During a tasting, he confessed, “I felt like I was working in the desert of the blockbuster era.”

Wrapping up the tasting, our host, the usually taciturn Jacques, surprised and relieved that there were so few disappointments among the 57 vintages tasted, became very emotional, describing the event as an extremely rare opportunity to explore the legacy of one family and one estate over 100 years. His son Georges helped serve the wines with Jacques’ nephew, Alexander De Raeymaeker, and is expected to eventually take over Le Pin once he completes his oenology studies in Adelaide. He is already practicing his own Chardonnay vineyard there, so the future seems certain.

Tasting notes, ratings and suggested best before dates on Purple Pages JancisRobinson.com. International distributors on Wine-searcher.com

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