Chateau Tronquoy Lalande St. Estephe 2018 French Red Wine 750 mL

From the same team at Château Montrose, this 30ha vineyard is in the heart of Saint-Estèphe on gravel and clay soils up to 8m deep over limestone subsoils—all on a series of outcrops offering great drainage.

Produced by the team at Château Montrose

This vineyard, owned by Château Montrose, has a bit more clay and is more inland than Montrose. The 2018 Tronquoy-Lalande is composed of 51% Merlot, 44% Cabernet Sauvignon, 3% Petit Verdot and 2% Cabernet Franc, harvested from September 18 to October 4. Deep purple-black in color, it has a very spritely and open-knit nose of freshly crushed blackberries, black cherries and redcurrant jelly with touches of spearmint, lavender and milk chocolate with a hint of garrigue. Medium to full-bodied, the palate is completely packed with layers of black fruits with a lovely display of red fruit sparks, framed by firm, fine-grained tannins and a lively backbone, finishing long.

As I wrote earlier this year, Tronquoy-Lalande is an estate that deserves to be much better known. This was the second vineyard planted in Saint-Estèphe, after the Clos of Calon-Ségur, but its Royalist owner didn’t participate in the 1855 classification due to his disapproval of Napoléon III. The vineyard itself consists of a single 30-hectare block on an eight-meter-deep gravel ridge directly behind châteaux Meyney and Montrose. Certified organic with the 2021 vintage, Tronquoy-Lalande has never seen herbicides; and after its acquisition by Olivier and Martin Bouygues in 2006, the winery was redesigned with input from the late Jean-Philippe Delmas, equipped with two-tiered stainless steel tanks after the model used at Château Haut-Brion. Ably overseen by Yves Delsol, who has worked at the estate for 30 years and thus knows its every detail, the style is seamless, complex and concentrated, with structural elegance that reflects the quality of these gravel soils more than it does any stereotypes of Saint-Estèphe rusticity. Indeed, in any revision of the 1855 classification, this estate will clearly win classified growth status.

Lisa Perrotti-Brown