Saint-Émilion, Disneyland for Wine
Today I'm in Saint-Émilion, making wine with the team from Sol Béni, and Philippe and the crew here have been amazing again. It's vintage at this very small but gorgeous winery, and the rhythm of the day tells you everything about how they work. Calm and quiet as the morning starts, then when the grapes actually come in, the crazy happens, trucks, sorting, decisions made fast. What holds it together is a philosophy I keep seeing in the best winemakers, quality isn't about doing more, it's about knowing when to do less. Adding things in only when the wine actually needs it, and otherwise leaving it alone to do what it's going to do anyway. Ludwig is an incredible constant here and very clever at making wine, one of the best I've been told, so I'm very lucky to be working alongside him.
Philippe and the team at Sol Béni were so incredibly welcoming. He's a football coach in Japan, quite famous so I've been told, which is a funny thing to learn about the person whose hands are in your glass. Him and his wife Dominique made me feel like part of the place within an hour of arriving.
Sol Béni is a Saint-Émilion Grand Cru, which is worth explaining properly rather than just dropping in as a label. Grand Cru here isn't a marketing word, it's a classification tied to where the vines actually sit, and it comes with real restrictions on yield and how the fruit is grown. This wine is primarily Merlot, around 90 percent, with smaller amounts of Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon rounding it out. The vines sit on clay limestone soils with an average age of 45 years, and everything is harvested by hand rather than machine, which on the right bank of Bordeaux is still very much the standard, not the exception.
I landed in Saint-Émilion village a bit late to make too many choices about where to eat or where to go, but I managed to explore quickly, arriving at about 5 o'clock from the winery. If you're ever coming here yourself, you need at least a morning to see the village properly, and honestly two nights is the right amount of time, one full day to explore and then a second to go back to whatever you loved the first time round. One night never gives you that. Still, I made the most of it and worked my way through the wine bars until I found the two that actually mattered. One stays open past nine, a small cave built into the hill, properly authentic, dark, moody, good music, better wine. The kind of place where the locals go rather than the tourists. Sous La Robe wine lounge, if you're ever here and want to know.
The place I'm staying is Logis des Jurats, not the best address in Saint-Émilion, but perfectly fine for what I actually need, which is a bed and a shower before the next morning starts early.
Sunday morning Ludwig picked me up at 10.30 and we went back to the winery to pump over and feed the wine. A pump over sounds simple, but it's doing real work, it pushes the fermenting juice up and over the cap of skins sitting on top, which extracts colour and tannin and keeps the whole ferment even rather than letting one part run hotter or slower than the rest. We made up the yeast, left it to get going while we ran samples to the lab, and by the time we got back from dropping them off it had properly taken off, foam everywhere. What stuck with me most was something Ludwig said about there being no recipe to making wine. It's not a throwaway line, it's the actual method, you work from your senses, your feel, your smell, your taste, and the knowledge that sits behind all three. We checked the water temperature by hand rather than a thermometer, because your hand tells you enough, and the yeast were clearly happy with it.
"Put it in your cellar," Ludwig said, meaning swallow the last bit. A very Bordeaux way of telling you not to waste good wine.
PS: there is no white wine made in Saint-Émilion