Château la Borie: The wizard of Suze

Nothing piques my interest more than an unknown estate from an unexceptional appellation that suddenly starts making brilliant wine.

It sparks an insatiable desire to discover what changed, and how they did it.

Over the past few years, Château la Borie in Suze-la-Rousse has been rapidly improving, culminating in its 2023 Syrah winning Best in Show at the 2025 Decanter World Wine Awards.

A tasting of its 2024 Syrah proved that this wasn’t just a fluke. I paid them a visit to uncover the source of this transformation.

A new broom

When I first met Raphaël Knapp in 2019, he had just bought Château la Borie, so at that point he had no wine to show me.

For 15 years previously, Knapp had worked as an importer in California, specialising in artisanal French wines. Eventually he got homesick, and decided to return to his home country.

Suze-la-Rousse is one of the 21 named villages in the southern Rhône. Much of the flat plain that surrounds it is littered with small pebbles.

It’s a hot terroir best suited to punchy, warming reds but it rarely rivals Châteauneuf for complexity or Cairanne for finesse.

When he bought this 60ha estate, it was underperforming, making unremarkable Côtes du Rhône.

But Knapp thought the terroir had potential; he described it as a ‘sleeping beauty’. But my visit brought to mind a different story: that of the Wizard of Oz.

A tale of two terroirs

As I was driving through endless fields of sepia-coloured stones, I was unexpectedly transported to a technicolour landscape.

It turns out that Suze-la-Rousse is only partly stony – there’s also an outcrop of vibrant, ochre-coloured sandstone.

The change is so sudden that I originally assumed this incongruous soil must have been dumped on the path by some crooked builders.

Like some kind of yellow brick road, it opened out into vineyards that dazzled with colour – not just the yellow sands, but blue-green wild thyme, and bottle-green moss.

Could this be the source of the quality revolution at Château la Borie? On arriving, Knapp converted the estate to organic farming; but no, otherwise the vineyards themselves are little changed.

We went back to taste in the fairytale château itself, still stuck in time. But the wines were anything but antiquated. The whites and rosés are still work in progress, but the reds sizzled and popped with colour and flavour.

The two that stand out are both produced on that mustard-coloured sand – one a Grenache, the other a Syrah.

The Grenache has such purity and luminosity, it’s like a bowl of red berries in a stained-glass window. It’s a brilliant expression of Grenache, unhindered by excess body, alcohol or oak.

If anything, the Syrah is even better. The aromatics rise like smoke from the glass, as sharply defined as shadow puppets: bacon, menthol, pine resin and pink peppercorns.

Its complexity suggests a northern origin, but its volume and plenitude locate it firmly in the south.

Secrets of the cellar

If the vineyards are little changed since Knapp took over, then that confirms it, I thought – the magic must be conjured in the winery. We unlocked the doors and I stepped gingerly inside.

But when the curtain is pulled back, it’s the same old winery as before; a rickety metal staircase, tall concrete tanks and plain plastic buckets. No amphorae, no biodynamic dynamiser – not even a new oak barrel.

At the end of the 1939 MGM classic, the eponymous wizard turns out to be a fraud. But unlike him, Knapp has never claimed to be something he isn’t.

He’s just doing his best to make good wines with the set-up he’s inherited from the previous owners.

Thanks to Knapp’s courage, brains and heart, now we can see what this unloved estate was really capable of. He still has some self-doubt.

‘I’m constantly critical of myself and trying to be better,’ he says. ‘But I’m also surprised we managed to get to this quality so quickly.’

In the end, it turns out there was no great transformation in the vineyards or in the cellar. The alchemy is all just down to a new owner – Raphaël Knapp – the Wizard of Suze.

A new vision and a fresh pair of hands can make all the difference.

Château la Borie wines are imported to the UK by Clark Foyster Wines

Tasting eight Château la Borie wines:

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