Producer Profile
Château Roc de Cambes
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The outstanding wine of its appellation, Roc de Cambes is made by the meticulous, eccentric and inspired François Mitjavile, who is perhaps more famous for Tertre Roteboeuf in Saint-Emilion.
He bought the latter in 1978, shortly after he first settled in Bordeaux, and acquired Roc de Cambes less than ten years later in 1987. It required a lot of work, so much so that François didn’t celebrate his first vintage there until 1989.
The 12-hectare vineyard, which contains some very old vines (some up to 50 years old), lies on rock shelves with deep clay-limestone soils overlooking the Gironde. The terroir isn’t dissimilar to Tertre Roteboeuf, and the grape varieties are also akin to the classic right bank mix, being a blend of 75% merlot, 20% cabernet sauvignon and 5% malbec.
The wine is vinified in concrete tanks before being transferred to barrels, half of them new oak, for 18 to 24 months. The flavour of the wine has the natural sweetness and silky flavour of late-picked, gently extracted grapes. Roc de Cambes is a wine that is lovely to drink at the start, middle and end of its five to 20-year drinking window.
Regional Note
Bourg, Blaye, 1er Cotes
The best growers in the less-fashionable regions of the satellite appellations Blaye, Bourg, and the old Premières Côtes have to work that bit harder to get their wines known and the quality is often exceedingly high while the prices remain sensible.
Blaye is the northernmost of these satellites, named after the town of Blaye (pronounced ‘Bly’), which sits on the varied soils of the right-hand shore of the great Gironde estuary. Merlot dominates and the majority of the wines are soft and easy-drinking, balanced and flavourful, but without the dominance of new oak. The wines are usually ready to drink much sooner than those of neighbouring Bourg.
Côtes de Bourg is a smaller region south of Blaye, where the Dordogne joins the Garonne to become the Gironde. The soils here are more homogenously clay with limestone and the wines, though still generally merlot dominated, are more robust with delectable tannins, and they benefit from a little more time in bottle as a result. They can develop extremely well with short to mid-term cellaring.
Before the draining of the marshes of the Médoc in the 17th century it was these areas that provided a good deal of the wine exported to Britain.
Castillon adjoins Saint-Emilion to the east along the Dordogne and inland to the north. It is developing a good reputation for its wines and several prestigious producers from neighbouring appellations have invested a good deal to make wine here and too very good effect alongside a number of excellent locals such as Château de Pitray. Merlot again dominates on a mixture of soils from clay to sand and gravel, though cabernet sauvignon is also has a presence.
A wider umbrella appellation controlee called simply Côtes de Bordeaux identifies special terroirs, which includes Blaye and Castillon with one or two others on the banks of the two rivers Garonne and Dordogne. The vast majority of production is red, made mostly from merlot, and there are many excellent producers here, such as Denis Dubourdieu.
Vintage Note
Bordeaux Vintage 2015
In 2015, Bordeaux produced a very good, and in some cases excellent, vintage.
It is unquestionably the finest for the past five years and the wines will provide a great deal of drinking pleasure for many years to come. The reds have attractive balance, with perfumed bouquet, fresh fleshy fruit and fine silky tannins. While the clarets do not have the weight of the 2009s and 2010s, they have real charm, finesse and vibrancy of fruit, expressing the terroirs from which they come.
Those with long memories have compared the style of 2015 with 1985, which produced wines that were not overly concentrated, but had good balance and freshness of fruit when young, and aged well.