The Merry Drinker

My name on the label is a guarantee of irreproachable quality, recognized around the world.
André Lurton

Immodest?  Moi?  But the maddening thing is, he’s right. Lurton is one of the big names of Bordeaux, and his wines are excellent.

The family’s empire began with François Lurton’s Château Bonnet.  In the 1920s François added the Margaux property Château Brane Cantenac. Then, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his sons André and Lucien bought up many more vineyards, so that André himself now owns eleven châteaux in Bordeaux and his wider family owns properties in Languedoc, Corbieres, Spain, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.  Family members also consult for two dozen other firms all over the world.

André’s properties are mostly in the Graves region: Château la Louviére, Château  Couhins, Château Rochemorin, and this week’s wine, Château de Cruzeau. By 1980 the Graves region had fallen into decline, and it was André who did more than anyone else to revive its fortunes, introducing modern techniques and refusing to accept the abysmal standards to which much local wine, particularly the whites, had fallen. André also campaigned successfully for the creation of a new appellation within the region, that of Pessac-Léognan.

You might suppose that following such accomplishments André Lurton would be a popular figure.  But this is France, a country whose inhabitants delight in perversity.  Three years ago, independent wine producers targeted Château Bonnet for a symbolic vine-pulling protest.

“Lurton represents the new class of producers who are omnipresent throughout the world and damaging our local industry, making it harder and harder for young winemakers to be successful,” complained one of their organisers.

This oaf’s demands, so far as I can understand them, were that the French government should support incompetent winemakers like himself by putting the Lurtons out of business and subsidising his own undrinkable rubbish.

Once upon a time such demands were usually met.  That is why, from around 1945 to 1995, low-budget French wines were generally awful, and why too many of the upmarket wines were rotten value for money.  The arrival of good, cheap wine from the New World put an end to all that, or so we thought.  But with the global economic crisis we hear growing calls for protectionism.  We must fervently hope such calls will be ignored, for if there is one class of people bound to suffer from trade barriers it is wine lovers like ourselves.

At any rate, all hail André Lurton.  Château de Cruzeau is a good example of what he can offer for around $30 (£24): a dense, full-bodied red with a mocha fragrance and creamy flavours of vanilla and cocoa.  Try his other reds too, and his whites.  (I praised one of the latter a couple of years ago.)  And while you are sampling these good, modern wines, pray that Nicholas Sarkozy’s remark that “Europe needs protection” turns out, like so much else about that absurd little man, to be nothing more than posturing.