Vieux Château Certan celebrates with unique tasting

This year, Bordeaux’s Vieux Château Certan is celebrating 100 years since it was acquired by the Thienpont family. db’s Bordeaux correspondent Colin Hay joined the family and a select group of eminent wine critics for an exclusive taste of a unique vertical to celebrate the occasion.

The life of a wine writer is full of surprises. And sometimes one has to pinch oneself.

The receipt of an email from Fiona Morrison and Jacques Thienpont inviting me to an exclusive and unique vertical on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the acquisition of Vieux Château Certan was the most recent of such moments.

The tasting itself took place in early June in Belgium in the glorious Hof te Cattebeke, dating from 1612 – the base of the Thienpont’s wine merchant business since 1842. Why there, you might ask, and not at the property itself? The reason is quite simple. For, following the acquisition of this already illustrious Pomerol estate back in the 1920s, a significant proportion of Vieux Chateau Certan’s bottling took place in Belgium.

As a consequence, the oldest bottles in the very best condition are typically those that were bottled in Belgium and that have not moved subsequently, remaining to this day in the cellars of the Hof te Cattebeke. The lion’s share of what we tasted in this exceptional tasting were bottles of this kind – bottles, in other words, of the best possible provenance.

Tasting

So, on 6 July a small flock of VCC aficionados converged on Lille to be conveyed across the border into Belgium for a tasting that will, I suspect, live with every one of us for as long as we remain sentient. They included Neal Martin (of Vinous), Jancis Robinson (of Purple Pages), Pierre Citerne and Pierre Vila Palleja (of La Revue du Vin de France), Thierry Desseauve (of Bettane & Dessauve), Aldo Fiordelli (of James Suckling) and, of course, yours truly – I am still pinching myself.

The story of the acquisition itself is quite an interesting one, fantastically set out by Fiona Morrison in her typically exhaustive and engaging guide to the tasting in the following terms. “In 1924, Josephine Billiet asked her husband Georges Thienpont if she could use her own money to purchase the beautiful estate of Vieux Château Certan. Having purchased Château Troplong Mondot in 1921, he acquiesced immediately, and the couple began their almost 40-year adventure, traveling to and from Etikhove and Pomerol”.

Appropriately enough, given this, our hosts in Etikhove were three – Fiona and Jacques, and joining us from Pomerol, Alexandre Thienpont. He, of course, lives at Vieux Château Certan and, crucially, he made all of the wines that we tasted from 1986 to 2011 and, alongside his son Guillaume, those from 2012 to the present day. He guided us through successive flights and the passage through time they represented.

History

As Fiona Morrison’s brief history of the property itself explains, “By the beginning of the 20th century, the wine business was run by Georges Thienpont, who travelled regularly to Bordeaux to purchase wines in barrel. With the collapse of Wall Street and the Great Depression in the 1930s, Georges Thienpont reluctantly had to sell Troplong Mondot. He continued to make wine at Vieux Château Certan, producing some incredible wines in the 1940s and 1950s despite the difficulties of the Second World War and the Great Frost of 1956. Upon his death in 1962, one of his sons, Léon, who had an agricultural degree, took over the running of the château and moved into Vieux Château Certan”.

The family tradition continues. As Fiona again explains, “Today, it is the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Georges who carry on the family legacy. Jacques, who now lives at Hof te Cattebeke, became the owner of the tiny Le Pin in Pomerol in 1979 and took over the wine merchant business in Belgium. Léon’s son, Alexandre, lives at Vieux Château Certan and made the wine from 1986 to 2011. His son Guillaume is now making the wine”.

The wines for this historic and unique tasting came mostly from the cellars of Hof te Cattebeke. They have never been moved since their release.

As my detailed tasting notes below testify, this was a truly unique and exceptional tasting. Yes, the wines are historic, and it is impossible not to be distracted just a little by the thought of what was going on in and around the vineyards and, indeed, in both Bordeaux and Flanders more generally, when vintages like 1923, 1925, 1926, 1928, 1934 and, perhaps even more so, 1940, 1942, 1943 and 1945 were being made.

But so many of these wines, or at least the bottles we tasted, turned out to be time capsules in another sense. For they were so vivid, alive, bright and intact; it was as if we were travelling in and through time. Never before have I been at an historic tasting spanning anything like this timespan with such a high proportion of wines for which no age-related excuse needed to be made. That says much for the timelessness and ageability of VCC, the singularity and exceptional character of its terroir and the sustained care with which it has been expressed over now a full century in the hands of successive generations of Thienponts.

And while it is difficult to capture it precisely, there is also a seamless thread – the figurative DNA of terroir and perhaps the more literal DNA of those expressing it – running through each and every one of these wines. A tasting like this offers a perspective on a property that very few have and I feel that it has imprinted in me a deepened sense of the uniqueness of this utterly brilliant and hallowed corner of the plateau of Pomerol.

What was also made very clear to me is that VCC has never made wines better than those it makes today. But there are plenty of vintages that run the stars of the last decade very close indeed.

The true greats: 1945, 1947, 1983, 1990, 2010, 2020

Exceptional: 1934, 1948, 1961, 1966, 1982, 1988, 2005,2006, 2009, 2019

Remarkable: 1943, 1948, 1962, 1964, 1971, 1985, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2011, 2012.

See here for full tasting notes.