©Florian Rossignol, 20th January, 2022

A week ago our team had a chance to sit together, taste and discuss two interesting bottles made by the Guinaudeau family. In case that name is not familiar to you, they are the family behind one of the world’s most individual and high quality wines – Château Lafleur. The Guinaudeau family have been producing fine wine in Bordeaux’s Right Bank for generations, and in addition to their well known Pomerol estate where Château Lafleur and Les Pensées are made, high quality expressions of limestone terroir are made at their Fronsac estate, and that’s what I would like to share with you today.

The red is called Les Perrières, and the white is called Les Champs Libres, created in 2018 and 2013 respectively, by the next generation of the family – Julie and Baptiste Guinaudeau, at their estate in neighbouring Fronsac. It’s a labour of love, with the quality of work matching that at Lafleur, these two labels represent excellent quality/price, and makes them an insider connoisseur’s choice.

The creation of Les Perrières took nine years, to find, acquire and plant the parcels. With Bouchet (the historical name of Cabernet Franc in Bordeaux right bank) cuttings from the Château Lafleur vineyard in Pomerol, Les Perrières was born here. The initial full-scale experimental vintages were labelled ‘Acte’. ‘Les Perrières’ debuted with the 2018 vintage, and that’s what we were lucky to taste recently. The 2018 Les Perrières is a blend of 51% Bouchet and 49% Merlot. This wine gives intense nose of black plum, liquorice, and the sweet perfume of vanilla, while the palate is coated with juicy black fruits with complex layers, toasty notes and a distinct minerality and tension coming from the limestone soil. This is a wine full of bold freshness and ripe tannins. I will suggest you keep it in the cellar another 2-3 years for it to open up a little more, though I expect its drinking window to be long.

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The Les Champs Libres is the white partner to Les Perrières, from the 2019 vintage it also labelled in the style of Château Lafleur (and no white is produced at Château Lafleur itself). Julie and Baptiste debuted this with the 2013 vintage as ‘a true reflection of the philosophy of Lafleur', but in the context of a white wine. It is often pure Sauvignon Blanc from Sancerre cuttings, sometimes supported by a small quantity of Sémillon, produced on the clay-limestone soils of the Louima plateau, where it finds a great new voice. The 2019 Les Champs Libres we tasted is made with 95% Sauvignon Blanc & 5% Sémillon, intensely floral with lemon peel, oyster shell and pleasant salinity, zippy citrus acidity adds layers of complexity of the rich and creamy texture. We are big fans of this wine at The Fine Wine Experience, and you will see on our list 5 vintages available in Hong Kong – almost a complete vertical.

These two wines represent a new generation of ambition and effort from the family that brings you Château Lafleur, expressing a great but different terroir, and with the kind of quality we have learned to expect from the Guinaudeau family. We would invite you to explore them for yourself.