Margaux Focus 2: Château Palmer
BY NEAL MARTIN |
Nothing exciting ever happens on the Southwest train between Guildford to London. Passengers rarely converse. Businessmen gaze out of windows as verdant Surrey countryside whizzes past. Exhausted mothers cart gaggles of hyperactive infants to museums while teenagers gormlessly stare into Smartphones. It’s actually the perfect environment to write. This opening paragraph is being written as my train pulls out of Woking Station. Maybe one day I’ll be tapping away when a demimondaine of uncertain age but opulent charm will catch my eye, and she says: “Pardon me, Sir, but you look like the kind of gentleman who would profit from purchasing a famous Bordeaux château.”
I stop typing, scarcely believing her proposal out of the blue.
“You would be helping me out of a bind if you could take it off my hands.”
By the time our train pulls into Waterloo Station, we have reached a verbal agreement, and I will tootle off to my tasting, startled by my impetuosity and wondering how to explain it to my wife.
If only I could ask Charles Palmer how he explained it to his better half?
This article examines one of the noblest, most feted and certainly aesthetically pleasing estates in Bordeaux, Château Palmer. As usual, I delve into its storied background up to the present day, then the viticulture and vinification modus operandi after spending a day with CEO Thomas Duroux, and of course, the obligatory vertical tasting of vintages spanning a few decades.
History
The de Gascq Era
The genesis of the present-day Château Palmer derives from the splintering of the vast d'Issan estate during the 18th century. A section cleaved away by the Foix-Candale family in 1729 underwent a second division in 1748, one part-owned by sisters Marguerite and the magnificently named Hippolyte-Euphrasie. Their plots came into the hands of the de Gascq family, who owned swathes of prime Médoc, though back then, much of it was scrubland. De Gascq’s viticultural know-how fueled viticultural expansion in Margaux and Château de Gascq itself. By the 1760s, their wine was already becoming well-known, and according to the Tastet & Lawton archives, prices were on par with nearby d’Issan. Professor Pijassou estimates that de Gascq spanned as much as 50 hectares of vine by the time of the Revolution.
Charles Palmer, who lends the château its name.
The Rise & Fall of General Palmer
Palmer is one of Bordeaux’s leading estates. It is a fulcrum of innovation that perhaps it is not given due credit for. This in-depth article unearths its storied history, vineyard and winemaking minutiae gleaned from spending a day with CEO Thomas Duroux, plus the obligatory slew of tasting notes from both illustrious and esoteric vintages.
