Château Boyd-Cantenac 2005, Margaux
29th November 2008
I have just been watching Lost Horizon, the 1937 Frank Capra movie. It is a delightful film - beautifully shot, charmingly acted - and it has prompted much rumination on my part.
It tells the story of a group of travellers in Asia, led by a dashing British soldier-philosopher played by Ronald Colman. As they escape a violent insurrection in China, their plane is hijacked. Eventually they crash-land in the remote Himalayan valley of Shangri-La.
This place is all but inaccessible to the outside world. Walled in by high mountains, Shangri-La has extraordinary properties: its weather is always perfect; its climate heals all illness; its inhabitants live for centuries. Understandably, these people are blissfully content, and they have created a model society. One of them tells the Ronald Colman character,
“To put it simply, I should say that our general belief was in moderation. We preach the virtue of avoiding excesses of every kind, even including excess of virtue itself… We find in the valley it makes for greater happiness among the natives. We rule with moderate strictness and in return we are satisfied with moderate obedience. As a result, our people are moderately honest, moderately chaste, and somewhat more than moderately happy.”
At first the travellers are eager to return to their homelands, but Shangri-La gradually seduces them into staying. The only exception is the younger brother of the Colman character, a hot-tempered youth who remains desperate to escape. He has fallen in love with a local girl; both want to risk the journey across the Himalayas. Reluctantly, the elder brother feels obliged to accompany them.
During the trek the younger brother and his girlfriend perish. The Colman character barely survives, and is found suffering from amnesia in a Chinese village. When he recovers his memory, he becomes obsessed with returning to Shangri-La. After further adventure and a final trek, he succeeds.
At the time the film was made – during the Great Depression, with the First World War not long over and the Second looming – this tale must have seemed the perfect escapist fantasy. Who would not exchange their bleak, menacing world for a paradise like Shangri-La?
The answer, interestingly, was “almost no one”. The film was a critical failure and audiences stayed away. The reason for this, I think, is that utopias are not especially appealing – either this one, or those dreamt up by Plato, More or H.G. Wells. What all these imagined lands have in common is their finality, their completeness. People find this off-putting.
Our blessing and curse as a species is that we cannot be content with our lot. We are forever seeking increase and improvement, even when we have no need of either. For this reason, we would never accept the perfection of Shangri-La. Within days, most of us would find something there to grumble about. Those high mountain walls would seem like the bars of a cage.
This inability to be happy with what we have shapes almost everything we do. It makes us greedy and rapacious, but also inquisitive, discriminating and inventive. And all these traits account for the greatness of modern wine.
We do not know exactly what ancient wines tasted like, but we can be confident that most were pretty nasty. The cheapest were little more than vinegar, and even the best were mixed with honey and herbs to make them palatable. It was not until the Middle Ages that ordinary wine became good enough to serve neat, and probably not until the Renaissance that the best wines acquired finesse and breeding. I doubt if the great wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy acquired their present characters before the late eighteenth century; certainly, no one thought it worth classifying them until the middle of the nineteenth. The techniques used to make these wines have been refined and systematised, and they are now reproduced all over the planet, making high-quality wine available to almost anyone. And all because people were not content to keep mixing the stuff with honey.
The process is still at work. In recent years Château Boyd-Cantenac was generally written off by critics. As recently as 2004, David Peppercorn dismissed it as “lacking the style and finesse expected of a cru classé”. Since then there has been no change of ownership, and no acknowledged change in the way it is made. On the contrary, the Boyd-Cantenac site insists that “modernisation has always been considered with circumspection” and that the firm does not follow “changing and short-lived fashions”. Yet clearly something has changed, because the last few years have been spectacularly good, none better than this 2005. It is big, clean and suprisingly modern. True, it lacks the distinctive Margaux smokiness, but it makes up for that with a complex aroma of earth and spice, delicious, chewy fruit flavours, and a long cherry finish.
Has Boyd-Cantenac simply hit form? Or did its owners undertake a spot of serious reflection about quality and technique? For all their talk about not following fashion, the thing that struck me about this wine was its similarity to many of the more upmarket New World Cabernets, particularly those from the Napa Valley and Chile. Robert Parker, who adores this style of wine, awarded it 93 points on his 100-point scale.
Now I can see why no self-respecting French firm would openly admit to modernising its methods, especially to please the despised Americains. But sooner or later even the most stubborn French traditionalist will feel that that the status quo just isn’t good enough, and that it is necessary to move on to something better. That feeling is universal and unshakeable. It explains why wine standards keep rising and why, if offered the chance, so few of us would care to live in Shangri-La.
