Quality, Quintus and Confusion in St. Emilion

It’s not often we receive an invitation for a day-long wine tasting, but one that didn’t reveal anything about the wines was unique in the history of JamesSuckling.com.

We accepted the invite despite the mystery, because the host was Prince Robert de Luxembourg, the chairman and CEO of Domaine Clarence Dillon, the owner of Chateau Haut Brion in Pessac-Leognan, which invented modern-type Bordeaux red wine around 1650. That’s Big Wine History, and the names alone (Robert de Luxembourg is also 12^th in line to the Luxembourg throne) were enough to justify our attendance.

Then the location was announced: Oswald’s, in London’s posh Mayfair district. It’s a private dining club, but contacts told me the wine prices there are friendly – so long as you pay the 3,000-pound ($3,640) annual membership fee or a member invites you.

The timing was also made crystal clear. I stepped through the door of Oswald’s shortly before the official entry deadline of 8:30 am on Tuesday, May 31. The super-plush and British upper-class ambience made me feel like Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days when he returned to the Reform Club after circumnavigating the globe to win a huge bet. But the mystery remained: what wine experience was I going to “win” that day?

Finally, just before 9:00 am, the cat was let out of the bag. Robert de Luxembourg explained that we would be tasting six different vintages of Domaine Clarence Dillon’s St. Emilion property, Chateau Quintus. For each of the vintages from 2011 through 2018, Chateau Quintus would be served in a blind comparison with the same vintage of five other top St. Emilion chateaux: Angelus, Ausone, Cheval Blanc, Figeac and Pavie. That means a total of 48 St. Emilions served in eight flights of six.

If that had been written on the invitation would everyone have come? Maybe not. You see, St. Emilion’s reputation for great red wines only reaches back a century to the release of the 1921 vintage of Cheval Blanc, which is quite recent compared with the legendary Haut Brion.

“We want to check our scorecard for the first eight vintages of Chateau Quintus,” Robert de Luxembourg explained to the group of fine-wine traders, top sommeliers and journalists from three continents that had gathered for the occasion. That’s understandable.

Of course, it was also an expensive piece of PR for Quintus because all the other wines had to be purchased, the whole of Oswald’s was rented for the day and dozens of guests were given two delicious meals. I’m not criticizing – just observing. And no doubt about it, it was a fascinating tasting with some amazing wines, of which the simultaneously voluptuous and refined Château Quintus St. Emilion 2015 was one of the stars.

But the tasting also raised a bunch of questions about the St. Emilion appellation and its wines. First, St. Emilion is not a homogenous appellation. Instead, its 5,400 hectares of vineyards are divided into several sub-zones with differing soils, topographies and microclimates. Nor is Quintus a coherent historic vineyard.

Let’s take a look at how Domaine Clarence Dillon pieced the property together. First, they purchased Chateau Tertre Daugay in 2011. The 2011 and 2012 vintages of Quintus tasted at Oswald’s came entirely from here.

Then the company purchased the more highly re­­garded Chateau l’Arrosee in 2013. It was a direct neighbor on the quite steep south-facing slope, or cote, of St. Emilion. The remaining vintages tasted at Oswald’s partly came from these vineyards.

Finally, in 2021 they purchased Chateau Grand-Pontet, bringing Quintus’s vineyard holdings to 42 hectares and making it one of St. Emilion’s largest properties. These new vineyards lie more than a mile from Chateau Quintus on the St. Emilion plateau, a very different terroir. They are also on gentle northwest facing slopes, so the exposition is different, too.

Does that sound confusing to you? Many experts would agree that the Medoc, on the Left Bank of the Gironde estuary, is a model of simplicity compared with the fragmentation and complexity of St. Emilion on the Right Bank.

The 1955 classification of St. Emilion’s leading chateaux was supposed to bring clarity, but initially it was received with skepticism because there were 12 Premier Grand Cru Classe chateaux compared with four in the Medoc plus Haut Brion in Graves in the famous 1855 classification of the Left Bank.

On the other hand, experts welcomed the way the St. Emilion classification promised to reward rising stars and punish underperformers. However, after an updating of the classification system in 2006, and another in 2012, there were storms of criticism plus a slew of lawsuits brought by the owners of demoted chateaux.

In 2021, Ausone and Cheval Blanc separately withdrew from the classification and abandoned using the designation St. Emilion Premier Grand Cru Classe A, its highest level. Both cited issues with the new criteria. In early 2022 they were followed by Angelus. Trouble in paradise!

Although Quintus is made up of what were three chateaux classified as St. Emilion Grand Cru Classe, it is only a St. Emilion Grand Cru. That’s the lowest level of the classification. Crazy?

So did the blind tasting at Oswald’s help clear some of the heavy St. Emilion fog?

The 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018 vintages of Quintus are stunning wines. No wonder many of the tasters at Oswald’s felt that they had underrated the property in the past. On that level, the event was a PR coup for Domaine Clarence Dillon.

However, it also made clear that what builds the reputation of leading chateaux is not official classification rankings, but high wine quality and stylistic consistency over a period of decades. All the experts and enthusiasts know which properties belong in that first group.

With just eight vintages released and the 2019 coming soon, Quintus is just beginning the long process of building a luxury Bordeaux wine brand.

Yet the latest vineyard acquisition throws a question mark over its stylistic profile. Will it remain as lush and silky as it has been? We suggest you treat these tasting notes as a progress report.

Of the other chateaux whose wines we tasted, Figeac had the greatest stylistic consistency, and this was frequently combined with stunning quality.  Its wines have been highly regarded since well before the advent of St. Emilion’s classification, so its place in the appellation’s first group isn’t disputed.

A number of wines from famous chateaux in the tasting showed less well than when they were rated by James Suckling a few months after bottling. Much of that can be attributed to their being in a closed stage, and they will probably show better after a few more years of bottle age.

The poor showing of all the 2013 vintage wines almost certainly does not fall into that category. All six wines seemed to have lost fruit on the middle palate, the tannins tasting more rustic than most of the group of tasters expected.

They are not a good bet for further aging, in contrast to the stunning wines of the 2015, 2016 and 2018 vintages, which all have great aging potential. And many of them can be enjoyed now.

The average ratings I gave were 98.2 for the rich and voluptuous but very refined 2015 vintage, 97 for the more firmly structured 2016s, and 95.2 for the very generous and immediately appealing 2018s. That all confirms the high opinion of these vintages in St. Emilion that James had from the moment he tasted cask samples of these wines in the spring after each of those harvests.

The tasting also strongly confirmed the positive impression of the somewhat less spectacular but nonetheless interesting 2017 (average score 94.3) and 2014 (average score 94.2).

So, thanks to the recent string of very good to great vintages in St. Emilion, there's no shortage of exciting wines available.

St. Emilion may be a maze, but these days it’s often a very beautiful one!

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor