Producer Bordeaux, France
Château Coutet
Château Coutet is in Barsac, the most northerly of the communes that make sweet wine within the Sauternes appellation south of Bordeaux, and it is one of the properties classified as a Premier Cru in the 1855 classification of Sauternes and Barsac. Barsac wines may be sold as either Barsac or Sauternes; Coutet uses Barsac, which is the more precise answer.
The buildings tell you how old the place is. It began as a 13th-century fortress, and the square battlemented tower still standing in the middle of the courtyard is military architecture. The Salasse, a fortified house on the site, is 14th century; the chapel and two further towers went up in the 18th. As a wine estate it starts in 1643, when Charles Le Guérin, Lord of Coutet, made it one of the first vineyards in the Sauternes appellation, and it stayed with his descendants until 1788. Thomas Jefferson, who was American ambassador to France from 1785 to 1789 and a keen buyer of Bordeaux, called it "the best Sauternes in Barsac". In the 19th century it belonged to the Lur-Saluces family, who also owned Yquem, de Fargues, Filhot and de Malle, and it stayed with them until the 1920s. Henry-Louis Guy, an industrialist from Lyon, bought it then and installed the Guy & Mittal hydraulic presses that are still in use. His daughter ran the estate until 1977, and the estate's rarest wine, the Cuvée Madame, is named in her honour.
The Baly family bought Coutet in 1977. Marcel Baly and his sons Philippe and Dominique came from Alsace with no background in wine, replanted the vineyard, rebuilt the winery, and in 1994 signed an exclusive distribution and technical agreement with the Baron Philippe de Rothschild company that took the wine worldwide. Philippe has run the estate since the late 1980s. Aline Baly, Marcel's granddaughter, is the third generation and handles marketing and communication. In 2017 the Château Coutet 2014 was ranked third in Wine Spectator's Top 100.
What makes Coutet different from its neighbours is temperature. Barsac sits at the top of the golden triangle formed by the Atlantic to the west, the Garonne to the east and the Landes forest to the south, with the cold river Ciron running down into the warm Garonne and throwing up the autumn mist that botrytis needs. Coutet's clay and limestone holds water but not heat, and the cold can push the start of harvest back by as much as ten days compared with vineyards in Sauternes proper. That is the whole reason these wines have the nervy acidity they do. The vineyard is planted with Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle, and picking runs from September into November over thirty to forty days of successive hand passes, taking only the grapes that are ready. In 2015 that meant ten passes over 28 days with eighty people; in 2013, five passes over eighteen days.
The range is the grand vin; a second wine, La Chartreuse de Coutet, created by the Balys in 1977; the Cuvée Opalie, a dry white first made in 2010 from vines averaging 53 years old; and the Cuvée Madame, made only in exceptional years from Sémillon off the two oldest parcels, three years in barrel, barely a thousand bottles.
Winery at Barsac, Bordeaux · Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon · £30.95 to £59.95 a bottle
