Château Gilette: Meet the Sauternes aged 20 years before bottling

It’s hard to think of a more unusual wine in Bordeaux than Château Gilette.

I can say without hesitation that I have never used the phrase unicorn wine in my life.

But what else do you call a Sauternes that is aged exclusively in concrete vats for 20 years before release – never seeing any oak or oxygen – and which has a production of 4,000 to 5,000 bottles per year, if it is made at all?

While in vat, the wine sees no racking, no topping up, no extra sulphur and no lees stirring; in short, no nothing. It is moved into vat after fermentation with natural yeasts that can last until the summer following harvest.Vats are specially made in Italy and sized between 14 hectolitres (hl) and 45hl, each one adorned with a rather lovely carving of a single canary-yellow bunch of grapes.After a 20-year hibernation, the wine is racked off the lees, briefly freeing the aromatics that have developed anaerobically over two decades. It is then bottled.

The current vintage is 1999.

Just to drive the point home, this wine was laid down when Bill Clinton was US president, the European single currency had just been born and The Matrix was released at the cinema.

Gilette has been making wine like this since 1937, ploughing its own furrow in the face of confusion and raised eyebrows from the neighbours and trade.

It was a non-choice at first, due to the circumstances of Réné Medeville, grandfather of current owner Julie Gonet-Medeville.

He was forced off to war at a time when barrels and bottles were almost impossible to come by, and so a portion of his production was simply left in a vat to be dealt with when he returned from the front.

He did come back, eventually, but by that time it was 1946 and the wine was still there.

Fully expecting it to be ruined, he opened up the vat and found instead that the wine had stayed fresh and developed an array of aromatics that stood it apart from other Sauternes being made at the time.

Réné was impressed but unwilling to bet the house on the result, and so he made a crème de tête from this style of long-aged, unoaked botrytis wine, while continuing to make other styles that ranged from mouelleux to demi-sec to fully dry.

In 1967, his son Christian, who had taken over in 1953, decided to turn the entire production from the Château’s 4.5 hectare walled vineyard to the crème de tête production, where it has stayed ever since.

The vines in Preignac lie on sandy-gravel-over-limestone soils.

It is not for nothing that the owners are called the antique dealers of Sauternes.

Not only is the wine carefully protected for decades, but in the vineyard no plots are pulled up and no vines replaced except one-by-one, as the old plants die out. The oldest vines are almost entirely Sémillon, planted in the 1930s.

Since 2000 only three vintages have been missed – the 2000, 2012 and 2017 – but there have been long spells when nothing was made at all, such as from 1991 to 1995.

As you might expect, the entire production is sold direct. Try finding a négociant who is willing to hand-sell this story. Seventy percent goes abroad, mainly to Michelin-starred wine lists and to private collectors.

But then the Médevilles have always been self-sufficient.

They have been in the same building since 1710, backing on to the Garonne river by the former port and the Preignac church.

On the far side of the river the spire of St-Croix-du-Mont church sits high, but is only visible from certain angles, as the 1,500m-long Ile de Gruère obscures the view from one bank to the other.

Julie casually tells me that the Médeville family owns half of the island, which it shares with France’s agricultural research agency, INRA, and that they used to raise cattle on it. Today they grow only poplar trees. 

How the wine tastes

This is without doubt a wine apart.

Single bottles fetch around €200, putting Gilette squarely into the upper echelons of luxury wine, certainly in Sauternes, where I can only think of d’Yquem that equals it in price.

Maintaining that position takes a lot more than simply having a good story, as countless of their Sauternes neighbours can attest.

But I can promise you that the taste of this wine lives up to the myth.

Different vintages offer by turn caramelized fruit, salt-water taffy, tarte tatin, juicy apricot and fresh lime, all curiously weightless.

When young – 20 years old is young in this case – it’s fresher than you might expect.

When old it has the mandarin zest and spiced complexity of a Tokaj.

You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know you like it, which is why giving scores was exceptionally difficult during the tasting.

All I can really tell you is that you should get hold of some, and see for yourself.

The current owners, Julie and Xavier, are perfectly placed to understand how to keep fanning the flames of this strange period piece of a wine.

Xavier is from Mesnil-sur-Oger, where his family owns the Champagne house Philippe Gonet, and the couple now has a small Champagne estate Gonet-Médeville in Bisseuil, along with micro-productions of two wines in Margaux.

They have no more than 45 hectares in total across all their estates, making tiny quantities of sought-after bottlings.

That is a smart strategy, and one that saw Julie win a Talent award in 2018 from the Centre de Luxe et de la Création that recognises those who promote French artisanship worldwide.

There is also a separate Preignac estate, called Château les Justices, that follows a – slightly – more traditional path of two years ageing in vat and one year in bottle, still entirely unoaked.

But Château Gilette itself remains stubbornly true to its beliefs. ‘My father did try 27 years in vat with his first vintage and he had to admit that it was simply too long,’ says Julie.

Her own first vintage was 2005, which is still in hibernation right now. ‘That’s another benefit of our system,’ she says with a smile. ‘I’ve still got a good few years before I am judged on the result.’

Tasting notes for Château Gilette wines

See also:

Tasting Château La Gaffelière shows St-Emilion’s reinvention – Jane Anson