Could Château Lafleur alter the future of the appellation system?
Château Lafleur’s announcement that it is withdrawing from the Pomerol AOC and wider Bordeaux designation from the 2025 vintage, as reported by db last month, has sent shock waves through Bordeaux.
The effects of the Guinaudeau family’s decision are likely to be “seismic”, db’s Bordeaux correspondent Colin Hay said, prompting a debate on the “very viability of the appellation system in the face of accelerating climate change” and its “capacity to deliver the degree of regulatory flexibility that is urgently required”.
Some of the unposed and unanswered questions raised by the initial statement were later clarified by the family, via a conversation with influential French wine writer Jean-Marc Quarin. It showed what flexibilities in terms of irrigation, planting density, soil cover, canopy height and shading the family hoped to regain by withdrawing from the appellation.
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As Hay noted, by giving up the right to use the appellation labels ‘Pomerol’, ‘Bordeaux’ and even ‘Château’ to refer to any of Lafleur’s wines, the family is effectively launching a debate “that now urgently needs to take place – and which probably should already have been under way in some of the most impacted appellations, like Pomerol”.
The vast majority of Bordeaux properties are already impacted by the system’s perceived inadequacies – notably, its inflexibility and incapacity to respond to accelerating climate change “at sufficient pace”, Hay said, but they effectively had little choice other than to remain bound to and by the appellation rules.
“Those rules… need urgently to be revised to ensure that they work for these properties today and in the future,” he said. “There is no inherent reason why the appellation system cannot be reformed, but the extent of the reform required should not be underestimated.”
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