2022 Château Tronquoy, St. Estèphe
£119 per 6 bottle case in bond
We are yet to release our vintage review for the 2022 Bordeaux, which will follow next week, but the en primeur campaign is already under way, with a whole stream of lesser Châteaux releasing their wines this week.
As per normal, we will highlight wines we believe are of specific note in release emails such as this. Six of the Atlas team visited the region to taste this year, and we will show our own views alongside those of the major critics. If you are interested in the wine of a specific Château, do please let us know as we have access to a broader range than we offer individually by email. Our website will list all notable releases to date, and we will provide a link in each release email.
The vintage
To give a little background here, 2022 is a fascinating vintage, which has undoubtedly produced a good number of spectacular wines. It can probably be considered a vintage of ‘the haves and have nots’. It was a very dry vintage, but fortunately the preceding winter provided adequate soil water reserves. Terroir is key in a very dry vintage – the location, exposition and, most significantly of all, the soil structure all shape the ability to succeed. Winemaking in Bordeaux has certainly adapted to drier conditions, and it seems the vine itself is revealing incredible resilience, but so much came down to location. If your vineyards are situated on terroirs that benefit from a soil composition that can retain moisture at depth, you had a clear advantage. If the grape varieties grown were expertly matched to the terroir, you had another clear advantage. This, coupled with leading Châteaux’s inexhaustible focus on detail, by splitting plots into ever smaller parcels that can be monitored, harvested, and vinified separately before deciding if they benefit the final blend, has led to a set of rather stunning results. And the warm, dry conditions of such a vintage allowed the tannins to ripen fully – the careful extractions or ‘infusions’ that are common to a growing number of Chateaux’s winemaking approaches only assisted in bringing a sense of ever greater precision to the tannin expression in the resultant wines.
The Château
Today sees the release of Château Tronquoy, which at a very modest price ticks many of these boxes. The Château is owned by the Bouygues brothers who own Château Montrose and therefore benefits from considerable investment and winemaking expertise. The vineyards are situated on the humidity-retaining clay soils of St. Estèphe, where their proximity to the Gironde helps to moderate temperatures. Château Tronquoy has, over the last four or five vintages, already shown the benefits of a decade of increased attention to detail.
Here are the details of today’s release, including my tasting note alongside those of Jane Anson and William Kelley:
2022 Château Tronquoy, St. Estèphe
£119 per 6 bottle case in bond
It is clear that much effort has gone into elevating the quality of the newly rebranded Tronquoy, formerly Tronquoy-Lalande. This Château is under the same ownership as Montrose, and therefore benefits from the same winemaking team. A blend of 59% Cabernet Sauvignon, 35% Merlot and 6% Petit Verdot, the 2022 offers aromas of dusky fruits, mulberry, blueberry and damson, as well as classic St. Estèphe notes of iodine. This is a bolder example than I recall tasting before, with more depth on the palate, with a good solid core of dark, brooding fruit. Certainly, a wine that will require some patient cellarage before being broached; the tannins are finely expressed but lend direction. There is a sense that this vintage has plenty in reserve. Likely to be a keenly-priced example. Drink 2029-2042 (SL).
93 points, Jane Anson, janeanson.com
Black cherry and damson fruit, intense, concentrated sweet red liquorice and creamy cappuccino, balanced by bitter chocolate and dried herbs on the finish. This is clearly built to last, and excellent quality, in the character of the vintage. Tasted twice. 30% new oak. Harvest September 7 to 23. 37hl.h yield. First vintage without the ‘Lalande’ part of the name.
89-91 points, William Kelley, The Wine Advocate
The 2022 Tronquoy (formerly Tronquoy-Lalande) is an especially rich and powerful wine, offering up aromas of dark berries and cherries framed by creamy new oak, followed by a medium to full-bodied, rich and fleshy palate structured around lively acids and powdery tannins that assert themselves on the vanillin-inflected finish. A blend of 59% Cabernet Sauvignon, 35% Merlot and 6% Petit Verdot (which is an atypically high percentage of Cabernet from this estate, especially in a vintage where Merlot delivered better yields), it would appear to be intended to make an impression en primeur, as Tronquoy is now being sold on the place. That's a pity, as this estate's considerable intrinsic qualities would surely have made enough of an impression on their own.
Please let us know of your interest.
All the best
Simon
