Pages in the Photo Album: Vieux Château Certan 1928-2013

BY NEAL MARTIN | MARCH 23, 2022

One of the presumptions about Bordeaux proprietors is that they have tasted every single vintage of their own wine back to the Middle Ages. I’m often surprised how many winemakers possess relatively little experience of back vintages through no fault of their own. Over the last century, Bordeaux properties have constantly changed hands. What does the seller do before handing over the keys? Why, they invite their mates around to pillage the cellar, and if feeling generous, leave a few scraps for the new owners. That might sound selfish, but then again, they were the ones that made the wine, so why should they not enjoy the fruits of their labour? Many châteaux have depleted library reserves, even vintages just a few of decades old, as evidenced by the fact that on several occasions I’ve been poured wines from magnum because every single last bottle has been sold. Of course, there are exceptions, such as those properties that remained under constant family ownership that prudently set aside part of their stock for future generations. However, in bygone times, even the most famous estates were simply trying to stay afloat and had to sell every last bottle nature bestowed.

Therefore, when a collector organises a vertical retrospective, I am always pleased to see proprietors participating. Everyone wins. We can glean their insight, straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Winemakers are afforded a historical overview and often taste vintages they rarely experience or have never tasted themselves. For them, it must be like turning the pages of a family photo album, reminiscing about vintages they remember, some they’d rather forget and those undertaken by their ancestors. When Jordi Oriols-Gil organised a sensational line-up of Vieux Château Certan in London, I suggested inviting Alexandre Thienpont. Sure, he has tasted numerable ancient vintages. But, as with many Pomerol châteaux, older bottles of VCC are scarce despite the estate remaining under the guardianship of Thienpont’s father and grandfather since 1924. As I said, they had to sell practically the entire crop to get by, so Alexandre Thienpont is not sitting atop a huge stash of 1945s or 1947s. For this occasion, he flew over, especially to attend the tasting, back in January 2020 when COVID was a strange disease far away that would sort out within a couple of weeks. Around a dozen fully paid-up VCC-lovers gathered at La Trompette, one of the capital’s finest restaurants, to taste over 25 vintages back to 1928, including one or two that I am unacquainted with. Before I tackle the wines, a bit of background.

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History

I am not going to dwell too much on the history of Vieux Château Certan, partly because I have delved into this backstory in my Pomerol tome (No, I still don’t own any copies, and yes, I will eventually write a second edition) as well as subsequent articles. But allow me to adumbrate its formation.

The genesis of Vieux Château Certan lies with the Sertan estate in the 18th century; the etymology deriving from the word for “desert”, an inference that the land was hard to farm. The estate passed into the hands of the Demay family until 1858, when it was sold to Parisian Charles de Bosquet. The Demays held on to a parcel that begat neighbouring Certan-de-May. Early editions of Féret maintained VCC’s wines in high esteem and ranked the property above Petrus and Trotanoy. Nineteen twenty-four was its pivotal year when Vieux Château Certan was acquired by Georges Thienpont, a Belgian merchant from Etikhove. Thienpont had already bought Troplong Mondot three years earlier. In 1923, two Pomerol estates were up for sale: Vieux Château Certan and Château Taillefer. One must remember that Pomerol was not the highly-regarded appellation it is today. When Thienpont and Antoine Moueix, brother of Jean-Pierre Moueix, entered the notary’s office in Libourne, Moueix was asked to speak first. He declared that he wanted to buy Taillefer since it was closer to the railway station, allowing Thienpont to pick up Vieux Château Certan. You might assume that Thienpont would be elated by his acquisition; however, within several years he suffered three consecutive vintages of no crop to sell, 1931, 1932 and 1933, and no means to support his family, which forced him to relinquish Troplong Mondot in 1935. 

Georges Thienpont managed to survive the Depression and the privations of the Second World War. During this period, the vineyard comprised of around 50% Merlot, 25% Cabernet Franc, 20% Cabernet Sauvignon and 5% Malbec, the latter commonplace in Pomerol. What followed was a series of otherworldly post-war period wines, pinnacles of 20th century Bordeaux: 1945, 1947, 1949, 1950, 1952 and 1953. In my opinion, these wines represent one of the greatest runs of any estate, as I discovered in 2009 when I drank all of them in Los Angeles in one of the greatest flights ever assembled. How did Thienpont accomplish this with such rudimentary means at his disposal? Part of the crop would have completed its alcoholic fermentation in barrel because the chai was too small! Asking Alexandre Thienpont, he told me that it was a mixture of experience, serendipity and intuition. Georges Thienpont’s “winging it” resulted in accidents that yielded unforeseen positive results.

The chateau and cellar

In 1947, Georges Thienpont’s son, Léon, joined his father to manage the estate together with his brother Georges Jr. Léon Thienpont introduced château-bottling for the entire crop in the 1950s. Léon’s son, Alexandre was born in 1951. The family did not live at Vieux Château Certan but at Château Puygueraud in the Côtes de Francs, though the young Thienponts helped around the winery and were paid five francs per day to help during the bottling. In 1957, they finally constructed a new chai, and five years later, Léon moved his family to live at the previously uninhabited Pomerol château that now had seven children under its roof. Stainless-steel and an ageing cellar were introduced in the early Seventies, though that decade was plagued by a succession of poor vintages.