Vertical Tasting of Beaulieu Vineyard’s Georges de Latour Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon: 1965–2016
BY STEPHEN TANZER |
Beaulieu Vineyard is one of California’s most famous and historically important wineries. The flagship Cabernet Sauvignon, the Georges de Latour Private Reserve, will be celebrating its 80th anniversary in June. The winery staged an extensive vertical at my request in March. Covering vintages reaching back more than 50 years, the tasting was directed by new chief winemaker Trevor Durling, who took over in early 2017 as only the fifth full-time maker of this legendary bottling.
The Origin and Early Decades of Beaulieu Vineyard
Bordeaux native Georges de Latour established Beaulieu in Rutherford in 1900; his wife Fernande named the small ranch in Rutherford beau lieu, or “beautiful place.” In short order Latour purchased 128 adjacent acres and planted his first vineyards—80 acres of Zinfandel and Petite Sirah—which he called BV Ranch #1. After selling grapes for a few years, de Latour began making wine in 1909, not from his own vines but from purchased fruit and grapes grown under lease arrangements. He subsequently bought the 146-acre BV Ranch #2 on the south side of Rutherford from the Catholic Church in 1910, then planted it in stages over the following several years.
Thanks to his previous experience in Bordeaux, de Latour knew that all of California’s vineyards would have to be replanted due to the spread of phylloxera, which had first emerged in Sonoma County as early as 1873. And so he began importing resistant French vines, establishing a nursery in Paris to regraft them onto Rupestris St. George and 3309 rootstock and making them available to his winemaking colleagues in California. Then, prior to Prohibition, as more and more wineries were shutting down, de Latour leased another winery and purchased tanks and barrels to increase his production capacity. He also had the foresight to obtain a permit to produce altar wine for the Catholic Church well before the 18th Amendment was passed. Thus Beaulieu was able to expand during Prohibition (de Latour even opened an office in New York expressly for the sacramental wine trade) while other producers had to close down.
The Beaulieu Vineyard winery, originally built in 1885.
De Latour then purchased the old Seneca Ewer winery in 1923. The building dates back to 1885 and its four original stone walls are still the framework of the Beaulieu winery today, situated on the east side of Highway 29 in Rutherford. (A few acres of land came with this purchase and in the early 1990s Beaulieu bought some adjacent parcels; today BV #10 comprises 91 acres.) Also in 1923, de Latour purchased the first two blocks of what would become BV #3 from a property owned by the St. Joseph’s School on the east side of Rutherford just inside the Silverado Trail, then added a third block in 1928. He purchased a final fourth block in 1933, just before the repeal of Prohibition.
De Latour met the Russian-born viticulturalist/enologist André Tchelistcheff in France in 1938 and quickly hired him as winemaker at Beaulieu, in time to bottle the 1936 Cabernet Sauvignon, a highly concentrated wine from a growing season in which production was cut dramatically by severe late-spring frost. When Tchelistcheff arrived at Beaulieu and tasted what was at the time the de Latour family’s private wine, he insisted that it be bottled as Beaulieu’s flagship. The ’36 was released in 1940 and was labeled Georges de Latour Private Reserve after its founder, who had just died in February of that year. This bottling soon became California’s first icon wine—by most accounts, the 1936 Georges de Latour was California’s first varietal California Cabernet to gain international recognition—and Tchelistcheff became California’s most famous and influential winemaker, remaining in charge at Beaulieu through 1973.
Tchelistcheff made a number of crucial contributions to Beaulieu and to the California wine scene in general (and to the fledgling Washington wine industry as well, as Tchelistcheff began a consulting relationship with Chateau Ste. Michelle in 1967 that lasted for more than 20 years). He introduced temperature-controlled fermentation, adopted European methods of cultivating and pruning vineyards, pioneered the use of the laboratory as a multipurpose winemaking tool, and advocated for the use of malolactic fermentation for red wines. Prior to his arrival, most of the California wine industry didn’t believe that malolactic fermentation existed. Through the 1940s and ‘50s, Beaulieu’s top bottlings were frequently used as wines of state. And in 1943, George de Latour’s widow Fernande continued to expand the Beaulieu holdings. When 90 acres of the Martin Stelling Jr. property in Oakville became available in 1943, she snapped it up and it became BV #4. (Stelling had purchased a huge tract of vineyards that had been under the umbrella of To-Kalon Winery but that had been abandoned following Prohibition).
The Modern Era at BV
