Delivering Where It Counts: Meyney 1971–2017
BY NEAL MARTIN |
The annual Southwold tasting is always a useful litmus test of which château is doing the business where it matters most: in the wine glass. The hype and marketing that shroud Bordeaux risk obfuscating who is delivering the goods, which is why I value peer group blind tastings. They can be enlightening at a minimum, and often revelatory. Wishing no disrespect to Meyney, it is not a hip name to drop in Bordeaux circles, for several reasons. There is no illustrious history. A bank owns the property, not some grizzled winemaker who can trace viticultural ancestry back to medieval times. Meyney is no eye candy like Cos d’Estournel, and its wine is affordable, ergo not viewed as investment-grade material, which, bizarrely, some wine-lovers seek. Meyney never made it onto the 1855 classification.
And you know what? All that is irrelevant if time and again Meyney produces a wine that in blind tastings not only performs admirably against more expensive peers but triumphs against all comers two years in a row. Conclusion? Something is happening at Meyney, and I had better investigate. As it turned out, I was in the nick of time, since my visit was the very last before COVID-19 eviscerated my diary. At the end of February 2020, I drove up to Saint-Estèphe to meet winemaker Anne Le Naour, explore more about Meyney’s history and the factors underlying its improvement, and undertake a vertical to ascertain when the turnaround happened.
The facade of Meyney. Nice, but it does not possess the aesthetic allure of Cos d’Estournel or the helicopter pad of Montrose.
History
The genesis of Meyney is shrouded in obscurity. Not being the most illustrious of properties, this growth tends to be overlooked by wine literature (Vinous excepted, of course). Meyney has ecclesiastical origins, perhaps sharing more in common with properties on the Right Bank. A convent known as both Couvent des Feuillants and Prieuré de Couleys was founded on the site in 1662, and this date is still visible on the portal leading toward the chartreuse. The estate was confiscated during the Revolution in 1789, and thereafter its history becomes a little opaque, although by the time of the 1855 classification it was owned by the Luetkens family from Sweden. One thing for certain is that unlike its peers, it did not become a Grand Cru Classé.
“We don’t know why Meyney was not classified in 1855,” Anne Le Naour told me. “There used to be a small harbor at the end of the property, so it would not have been hard to transfer barrels down the estuary [and down to the city where the merchants collated prices.] There are two theories about why Meyney was not classified. In 1855 the Luetkens family owned Meyney, and a different branch, their cousins, owned Château de Lamarque. Apparently the Luetkenses were royalists and since Napoleon III had commissioned the classification, he refused to show Meyney at the exhibition. The other theory is that this part of the family was simply not good at selling and the wines did not meet the minimum price for classification.”
The 1874 edition of Féret lists Meyney among the Cru Bourgeois just under Marbuzet and notes its sizable production of 180 tonneaux, compared to 150 tonneaux at Cos d’Estournel and Montrose. That had fallen to 125 tonneaux by the 1893 edition. In 1919 Désiré Cordier of the famous Bordeaux merchant family acquired Meyney from the Luetkenses, although some editions state that his son Georges Cordier was the buyer on the deeds. (I suspect Désiré bought it intending to bequeath it to Georges.) The 1949 edition of Féret states that by that time there were 30 hectares under vine, 35 hectares of pasture bordering the estuary and another 25 hectares of workable land; by the 1969 edition, the land under vine had expanded to some 50 hectares. In 2005 an era came to an end when Cordier/Mestrezat sold their portfolio of estates to the French bank Crédit Agricole.
