Château Lafite Looks East

A modest little road, the D2, leaves Bordeaux and heads due north until it reaches the outskirts of the commune of Margaux. There it bends in a westerly direction to begin its journey through the villages and vineyards of the Médoc. Sizewise the D2 is not unlike Highway 29, which snakes through California’s Napa Valley, but there the resemblance ends. Instead of boutique wineries, the D2 links a succession of imposing châteaux, many of which have been producing great red wines for centuries. First up on your left as you drive along the D2 is Château Giscours, a Renaissance-style pile whose wines graced the table of Louis XIV at Versailles. Next comes Prieuré-Lichine, formerly owned by the Russian-born American wine guru Alexis Lichine, who did much to promote French wines in the US after World War II and who restored the ruined wine- producing priory here. Farther up the road is Château Palmer, whose imposing facade and four towers could compete with many a grand château in the Loire Valley. Then, just before the village of Margaux itself, Château Margaux looms large—one of only five premiers crus, or first growth, wine producers in the Médoc and one of the brightest stars in the wine firmament.

After Margaux the Route des Châteaux meanders through what was once flood-prone marshland, until it was drained by Dutch engineers toward the end of the 16th century. This part of the Médoc, with its sand, clay and gravel soils, is largely flat, barely higher than the nearby waters of the Gironde estuary. But as the road heads north into the commune of Pauillac, the land rises to form a distinct hill. Back in the days when the language spoken in southwest France was Gascon, this small hill would have been referred to by locals as la hite. Given the way languages evolve down the years, la hite morphed into Lafite. And the name has stuck, not just to the knoll in Pauillac, but also to its famous incumbent—Château Lafite Rothschild.

Thus does topography allow Château Lafite—and its neighbor Mouton Rothschild, which shares a bit of the hill—to look down on the rest of the Médoc. Although many might demur, this is probably as it should be: few wines can boast a more illustrious history or a more powerful presence on the world wine scene. If the great wines of Bordeaux represent a global benchmark for oenophiles then Lafite is, in turn, a yardstick by which Bordeaux wine producers gauge their worth. To be sure, Lafite shares its premier cru credentials with four other great Bordeaux wines—Mouton Rothschild, Margaux, Château Latour and Château Haut Brion—all of which would resent any suggestion that their wines are in any way inferior to Lafite’s. But Lafite can reasonably claim to be the first among equals, having topped the famous classification drawn up at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III for the 1855 Exposition Universelle de Paris, a world’s fair intended to showcase France’s agricultural bounty and industrial prowess.

Not convinced? Consider this: late last year, at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong, an anonymous Chinese phone bidder paid $232,000 each for three bottles of 1869 Château Lafite Rothschild—a record-breaking price for a vintage red Bordeaux and one that far eclipsed the previous record of $168,000, paid back in 1985 by the late publisher Malcolm Forbes for a 1787 Lafite that had been bottled for Thomas Jefferson. Although we will never know for sure, it’s reasonable to suppose that the new price record reflected, not just the general contemporary evolution of prices for fine wine, but the fact that between 1787 and 1869 Lafite had become more than just a great Bordeaux wine. It had become Lafite Rothschild, thanks to the château’s purchase the previous year by Baron James Mayer Rothschild, the founder of the French branch of the Rothschild banking family.

It was the beginning of a wine legend whose upward trajectory shows no signs yet of reaching its apogee. At the same Hong Kong auction that smashed the record for red Bordeaux, buyers shocked the wine cognoscenti by bidding up the price of 2009 Lafite Rothschild— wine so young it has yet to be bottled—to $70,000 a case. Prior to the auction the much-hyped 2009 vintage was being priced at around $18,000 a case by London wine traders, who make the futures market for red Bordeaux, or claret, as they often call it. (The English word claret derived from the French clairet, meaning clear or pale, and in the Middle Ages referred to a dark rosé or light red wine.) So the $70,000 Hong Kong hammer price represented a whopping increase of just under 300 percent.

Not since tulip mania hit 17th-century Holland has the price of a perishable product risen so far so fast. “Overnight, long-term target prices increased to levels people didn’t imagine were possible,” says Jack Hibberd, research manager at the online fine-wine exchange Liv-ex. Priced by the Sotheby’s auction at just under $6,000 a bottle, the 2009 Lafite is currently trading at roughly six times the price of its Médoc neighbor and chief rival Mouton Rothschild, and at twice the price of perennial Bordeaux high-flier Château Pétrus.

Is the 2009 Lafite worth it? To be sure, the prices paid in Hong Kong were artificially inflated and are unlikely to be matched any time soon. The reason: all the wines on sale at the Sotheby’s auction had come, not by way of wine merchants or private wine collectors, but from Château Lafite’s own cellars. Thus they enjoyed impeccable provenance—an important factor these days since high prices can encourage counterfeit wine. But wine is worth what people are prepared to pay for it, and there’s little doubt that Lafite has broken clear of the pack. The driving force that has brought Lafite to this point is the surge in demand from the Chinese—not just in Hong Kong, which has now overtaken London and New York as a global market for fine wines, but also in Taiwan and mainland China. Thanks to the Chinese, Lafite Rothschild has achieved a level of prestige and price that is the envy of all other wine producers.

Why the Chinese have taken to Lafite with such enthusiasm is the subject of much speculation in wine circles. Fanciful explanations include one claiming that Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest-reigning monarch, attributes his longevity to a daily dose of Lafite. Another explanation is that Lafite is easy to pronounce in Mandarin (compared, for example, with Haut Brion) and that it sounds much like the Chinese term for good fortune. But whatever the specific attraction might be, it’s evident that China’s recently minted millionaires and billionaires want to buy the very best and have decided that, when it comes to wine, Lafite is it.

Credit must also be given to the marketing skills of the team at Lafite, headed since the 1970s by Baron Eric de Rothschild and aided, since 1994, by estate manager Charles Chevallier. Lafite is one of a mere handful of winemakers to produce a website in Chinese, and it is also pioneering the production of wine in China, having created a joint venture with CITIC, the Chinese state-owned investment company, to plant vineyards in Shandong province. In a marketing coup that did not go unremarked by its Bordeaux competitors, recently Lafite decided to grace its soon-to-be-released 2008 vintage with the Chinese symbol for the number 8 (lucky and propitious in China) engraved on each bottle. Prices for the vintage immediately shot up.

Some fear that demand in China is being fueled by speculators and that Lafite prices, like those of 17th-century tulip bulbs, will come crashing down if Asia experiences an economic setback or the current Lafite fad fizzles out. But despite much talk of a bubble, there is little real concern that the Médoc sky is about to fall. Wine traders point out that, even before the Chinese onslaught, Lafite has had no trouble selling every bottle it produces in traditional markets.

That is a testimony to the vision and judgment of Baron James de Rothschild when he purchased the property from the descendants of the Dutch Vanlerberghe family in 1868. His nephew Nathaniel, from the British branch of the Rothschild dynasty, had already launched himself into the profitable wine business with the 1853 purchase of Château Brane-Mouton (later to become Mouton Rothschild), and much has been made of the ensuing rivalry between the two branches of the family—a rivalry that persists to this day. Baron James died within months of acquiring Lafite, but his purchase looked to be the shrewder of the two. In the 1855 Bordeaux classification, Lafite had been judged the best of the first growth wines. Mouton, on the other hand, was deemed worthy only of second growth status even though it was fetching prices (the criteria for the ranking) just as high as those of Lafite. Rumor at the time had it that Mouton was shunted to second because it was under British rather than French ownership, but whatever the reason, the ranking rankled Nathaniel and his heirs to such an extent that many years later his great-grandson Philippe de Rothschild composed a motto for Mouton: Premier ne puis, second ne daigne, Mouton suis (First I cannot be, second I do not deign to be, Mouton I am). That motto remained until 1973, when intense lobbying on the part of Baron Philippe secured Mouton’s promotion to premier cru status. The motto is now Premier je suis, second je fus, Mouton ne change (First I am, second I was, Mouton changes not).

The impeccably elegant Lafite doesn’t change much either. Even the Château’s second wine, Carruades de Lafite, is an international bestseller, commanding prices—notably in China, of course—that are higher than the first wines of most other Bordeaux vineyards. Château Lafite itself—a fairly modest manoir rather than grandiose palace—is much as it used to be when Baron James first bought the property in 1868. That was two years before the brief-but-bloody Franco-Prussian war, which saw the Prussians victorious and “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismark ready to impose heavy financial penalties on France in a bid to cripple the country’s economy for generations to come. The table on which the terms of the peace treaty were drafted is found in Château Lafite’s Salon Rouge. It bears what appears at first to be a wine stain, but closer inspection reveals it to be an ink stain caused, it’s said, by Bismark when he learned that the French Rothschilds had already found the money needed to cover France’s reparations—in his anger he thumped the desk so violently that he overturned the inkwell. Better than spilling a glass of Lafite which, at the recent auction price, would be about $46,000 a pop.

 

Originally published in the February 2011 issue of France Today