Henri Lurton makes one of Margaux’s most beguiling wines at his home estate, Ch. Brane-Cantenac. His approach is both technical and traditional, he tells us. Ch. Brane-Cantenac was classified as a second growth in 1855. It has been in the Lurton family for four generations; owner-winemaker Henri Lurton was born here and has worked every […]

L’Évangile, the Pomerol sibling of Ch. Lafite, shows that the great wines of tomorrow start with great terroir today. Here, we speak with Olivier Trégoat and Juliette Couderc, the ambitious new team at the helm  It’s a March morning in Pomerol. Olivier Trégoat and Juliette Couderc sit side-by-side on a Zoom call. They have known each other and worked together for some time, but they are only six months into their latest project – running Ch. L’Évangile.  Olivier is a soil expert whose […]

The wines of St Emilion are every bit as varied as its sprawling terroir, says Charlie Geoghegan. There’s no one style of St Emilion – and that’s truer now than perhaps ever before. St Emilion is a lot of different things. It’s a quaint little pocket of the fine wine world: a bucolic community of small estates, its rolling hills put […]

When he’s not advising Bordeaux’s biggest names, winemaking consultant Stéphane Derenoncourt can be found tending Domaine de l’A, his 12-hectare home estate in Castillon.    In 1999, Stéphane Derenoncourt was on the hunt for a vineyard of his own. “My dream was to buy a first growth in St Emilion,” he recalls. “But the bankers […]