Moving On: Lafon-Rochet 1955-2017
BY NEAL MARTIN |
Bordeaux moves on quickly. Changes in ownership can be met with protest and handwringing, yet they amount to little more than “rearrangements of furniture”. The room remains the same. The soil and vines are unmoved while proprietors change; their tenures are consigned to history. Time moves on, inexorable and impatient, rarely inclined to look back. However, that is precisely what I will do for this piece.
Basile
with his father, Michel Tesseron.
Back in the summer of 2021, I joined Basile Tesseron for a long-planned vertical tasting. Tesseron was chatty and amiable as ever, and we were briefly joined by his father, Michel. Spanning six decades, the line-up of wines confirmed the evolution of Lafon-Rochet since Guy Tesseron purchased the property in 1960. Though it can be argued that Lafon-Rochet never produced a bona fide transcendent wine that might challenge the Cos-Montrose-Calon trinity, its amelioration over the last decade cannot be ignored. During our tasting, Tesseron spoke about the context of the vintages with some interesting backstories.
Tasting
what was presumed to be the unlabelled 1955, which later transpired out to be
the 1964 Lafon-Rochet, he unveils perhaps the darker, less quixotic side
of harvests in bygone days. “We used to work with Romani people and detainees,” Tesseron explains. “There was a knife
fight between them, so my grandfather brandished a rifle and, together with the
police, managed to stop them. As a consequence, we bought a machine harvester,
and this is the only vintage picked by machine. In the mid-Seventies, we
started using pickers from northern Portugal, which we have used ever since.”
As we broach the 2000 Lafon-Rochet, Tesseron tells me how he was working
in London for luxury conglomerate Richemoine and how his interest in wine was
piqued when he began drinking red wine with the manager instead of cocktails. But
it was attending a private dinner with a London wine merchant when he
experienced an epiphany. Sotto voce, the host said that Basile would love the
bottle about to be poured. So, it turned out, it had such a profound effect
that Tesseron, rendered speechless and almost overcome, made excuses to leave.
That wine was a Romanée-Saint-Vivant from Lalou Bize-Leroy. As he retells this
anecdote, it reminds me how Tesseron has always been a refreshingly emotional
vigneron, someone led by his heart rather than mind, who wears his heart on his
sleeve. That wine convinced him that he had to become a winemaker, which is precisely
what he set out to do.
As we
taste the 2003 Lafon-Rochet, we discuss freshness. “My father was
obsessed with freshness,” Tesseron continues. “He began his career at
Sherry-Lehman in New York. He had wanted to be a banker and found a job on Wall
Street, but he only stayed there for two months. His first love was Napa wines.
It was the beginning of the Napa industry in the early Seventies, and he saw
how these wines were evolving. Later, he saw how those wines were becoming massive
and losing freshness. In 2003, when he saw the weather conditions, he knew he
had to pick early, so he cropped in two weeks. At the time, I was working in
Bordeaux for Vins des Maison Bordeaux. The weather conditions were
amazing during harvest. I remember my father said he might not be there the
next time you see a vintage with such ripeness levels. I’m glad we picked
early. The clay soils really helped - half the estate is based on that.”
