Finding Filhot: Filhot 1935-2015
BY NEAL MARTIN |
All Sauternes wines taste nice. I am not being facetious. The mellifluous texture and the sweetness at the core of every bottle tickle the senses into submission, and it becomes difficult to examine strengths and weaknesses when you are being so blatantly seduced. It’s like critiquing a litter of cute, yapping puppies one by one. The only way to do it is to compare the wines together in a single flight, preferably blind. I do that regularly, and over the years it has prompted me to mete out harsh words toward Château Filhot. In blind tastings I discerned that Filhot often lagged behind its peers in terms of concentration and complexity. So when I had an opportunity to visit the historic estate for a tour and a vertical tasting, I wanted to discover more and find out whether my reservations were well founded.
History
The origins of Filhot go back to the early 17th century, when vines purportedly occupied the present location. The château was constructed in 1709 by Romaine de Filhot, whose family owned a Sauternes estate known as Verdoulet (Thomas Jefferson was one of its early admirers). The French Revolution saw the proprietor of Filhot guillotined, though his daughter Josephine de Filhot successfully negotiated the return of the property to her family. This was quite an achievement given that she was married into the Lur Saluces dynasty, owners of Château d’Yquem and symbolic of the very landowners that the Revolution was supposed to rid the country of. Josephine's son Romain-Bertrand de Lur Saluces amalgamated the Pineau du Rey vineyard, enlarging Filhot to around 120 hectares, and rebuilt the château in 1845. The architect was Pierre-Alexandre Poitevin, whose design David Peppercorn MW describes as a "neo Louis XVI extravaganza." It is certainly one of the grandest anywhere in Bordeaux: double-winged, with an ornate fountain in the center of the courtyard. Inside is a maze of corridors and annexes so extensive that I had to mentally record my way to the toilet in order to find my way back. Louis-Bernard Fischer designed the English-style garden; his green-fingered handiwork can also be seen in the Jardin Publique in Bordeaux city. Today, lakes, forests and pasture occupy a majority of Filhot’s extensive grounds.
In 1855 Filhot was classified as a Second Growth. For some peculiar reason, after this the wine was labeled “Château Sauternes.” Why give your wine such a generic name when it is Filhot that consumers are familiar with? Fortunately, in 1901 the name reverted back to Château Filhot. Following the ravages of phylloxera, some estates never really regained their former glory once regrafted onto American rootstock, and this is arguably the case with Filhot. The vineyard began to decline, and by the 1930s it had withered down to 20 hectares. In 1935 the Comtesse Durieu de Lacarelle, the sister of Bertrand de Lur-Saluces, bought Filhot from her brother and began to reconstitute the vineyard. Her eldest son, Comte Henri de Vaucelles, took over the running of the property in 1974. He came from an industrial background and by all accounts was almost overwhelmed by the enormity of running such a large and demanding estate. Perhaps his background instilled the idea of quantity over quality; yields during this era were known to be high. In addition, de Vaucelles aged only a small proportion of his crop in barrel and tended to chaptalize a great deal. Gabriel de Vaucelles, one of Henri’s five children, joined in 1996 and still manages the estate today. He made much-needed improvements by replacing the fiberglass vessels with stainless steel vats, using native yeasts, extending the length of barrel maturation and using around one-third new oak.
Filhot is a charming estate. Aesthetically, the interior looks as if the clocks stopped between the two world wars: there are timeworn oak-paneled walls, ornate cornices, marble fireplaces, art deco mirrors, countless oil portraits of ancestors, and antique furniture that must have been in service for generations. One anecdote: Later in the evening, we asked for the heating to be turned up. A leviathan machine was wheeled in to blast out warm air. I wondered whether it had been built in the 1930s. It was just so unexpected, yet added to the quirkiness of the château.
