Château La Gaffelière – Château La Gaffelière 2017

There are comparisons one never plans. Château La Gaffelière was never really up for debate here as a rival to the Cyrus One - a Premier Grand Cru Classé against the second wine of a Greek estate would have been a lopsided proposition, all the more so since this house had already served as a reference for the first wine of La Tour Melas. That both bottles happened to be open at the same time nevertheless posed the question. And the answer turned out differently than expected.

The 2017 is a child of its vintage, and that vintage was a difficult one in Bordeaux: the severe April frost cost massive yields, the growing season ran early, and rain arrived at harvest. In our vintage database, 2017 sits at 6.5 out of 10, well below the Bordeaux median of 7.25 - and above all below the 8.5 of the 2019 vintage, from which the La Gaffelière already tasted here, scoring 93+ points, derives. It is a vintage of topography: those on higher ground came through; those in the hollows lost out. La Gaffelière was affected on its lower-lying parcels, with the technical sheet citing around 35 percent production loss. What made it into the bottle is therefore already the result of a hard selection.

In the glass, a peculiar duality has remained. The tannin is still abundantly present and makes itself felt - yet behind it the wine seems astonishingly flat, and it already shows quite pronounced oxidative traits, along with a touch of aubergine. What holds it together is a good salinity; it gives contour to the mid-palate where fruit ought to be. For a wine of this address, nine years after the harvest, that is early. This applies expressly to this bottle: a single appearance is no verdict on a vintage, and on the better terroirs 2017 produced very good wines.

The critics are remarkably divided on this wine, and the range is wider than for most wines of this rank. The Wine Advocate awarded 97 points in its final review of March 2020, with a drinking window through 2054, Falstaff came in at 95, while Jeb Dunnuck landed at 91. Six points of difference on the same bottling - that is not a rounding issue but a genuine disagreement about how much future one credits this wine with. The impression here lies closer to Dunnuck than to Perrotti-Brown.

The house calls for a clarification that regularly gets lost: Château La Gaffelière is not Château Canon-La-Gaffelière. These are two different estates in Saint-Émilion, and the historical name La Gaffelière-Naudès is not an alternative name for this wine. In the 2012 classification, this house stood as Premier Grand Cru Classé - a status the 2017 carries. That the family withdrew from the classification in 2022 changes nothing about this; the decision does not act retroactively.

The composition is well documented and yet not undisputed: the producer's own account gives 60 percent Merlot and 40 percent Cabernet Franc for 2017, and Wine Anorak and Le Monde confirm this. Jeb Dunnuck and the final Wine Advocate review, by contrast, cite 70 to 30. Here the estate's figure applies - but the contradiction deserves to be named, not smoothed over. It was aged for 15 months in 50 percent new wood.

That leaves the result of the unplanned comparison, and it comes out unambiguously: against the six-year-old Greek second wine, which shows no oxidative fatigue whatsoever, the Premier Grand Cru Classé seemed older on this evening than it is. That is no verdict on La Gaffelière as a house. On the contrary: at 94 points, this 2017 sits practically level with the 2019 tasted here (93+) - and that despite the vintage database placing two full points between the two years. Whoever produces a wine of this level from the frost year of 2017 has worked very respectably on difficult ground. What falls short here is not the quality, but the freshness.