Château Lynch-Bages – Endless Allure

Ned Goodwin MW takes us on a deep dive through the long and storied history of one of Pauillac’s original Cinquièmes Crus – Château Lynch-Bages. From its 18th-century roots to today’s illustrious custodians, here’s everything you need to know about Bordeaux’s endlessly alluring Super Second.

Lynch-Bages is the fifth growth that keeps on chugging, deemed by a forceful continuum of price rises on the secondary market as the qualitative equivalent of a Super Second. The Bages affix stems from the Pauillac hamlet in which the property is located. Here, the first vineyard was established by the Dejean family. The property was then sold to Pierre Drouillard in 1728, who bequeathed it to his daughter, Elizabeth. She was married to a Thomas Lynch, the son of John Lynch one of Ireland’s famed ‘Flying Geese’ who fled retribution after the Battle of the Boyne giving France names such names as Kirwan and Hennessy. This change placed the château under the aegis of his family name, before it ultimately became known as Lynch-Bages.

However, when the estate was classified in the 1855 Classification of the Médoc, the wines were sold under the name of Chateau Jurine Bages. That was because the property was owned at the time by Swiss wine merchant Sebastien Jurine. In 1862, the brothers Cayrou purchased the estate and restored the name Lynch-Bages.

‘...the qualitative equivalent of a Super Second, Lynch-Bages is the Fifth Growth that keeps on chugging...’

The seemingly interminable connection between Lynch-Bages and the Cazes family began in 1932 when Jean-Charles Cazes, born in 1877 and already in charge of Les-Ormes-de-Pez in St. Estèphe, leased the Château’s vineyards. The appeal was symbiotic. Lynch-Bages’ propitious riverfront location incorporated Pauillac’s hallowed alluvial gravels, while Cazes hailed from a pedigree steeped in Bordeaux folklore, his family the equivalent of winemaking royalty since the second half of the 19th Century.

When Cazes took over, Lynch Bage’s vineyards were dilapidated and in need of a complete overhaul. Replanting, however, was too expensive for the owner. Employing pecuniary skills previously unrealised, Cazes managed to buy Lynch-Bages, along with Les-Ormes-de Pez, on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War. The Cazes family have run Lynch-Bages ever since.

In 1970, the Cazes clan increased vineyard holdings with the purchase of land from Haut-Bages Averous and Saussus. By the late 1990s, their holdings well exceeded 100 hectares. In 1973, Jean-Michel Cazes joined the family business after working as an engineer in Paris. His remit was to modernise the entire operation, hauling Lynch-Bages into the contemporary age. His energy, effusive; his drive, incorrigible, Cazes installed a new vat room, insulation, storage facilities, cellars, loading docks and warehousing. The changes he made and the energy with which he made them, served as inspiration for others, inadvertently making him the unofficial ambassador of Bordeaux at large. This was only the start.

Cazes travelled widely, tirelessly proselytising the virtues of Bordeaux and specifically, Lynch-Bages. He transformed the role of salesman while preluding that of ambassador, employing any means necessary to establish the Lynch-Bages name amidst the qualitative Bordeaux firmament. These included sending a bottle into space with a French astronaut in 1975, and visiting China as early as 1986, auguring positively for Lynch-Bages’ prodigious success there today.

‘...Cazes travelled widely, tirelessly proselytising the virtues of Bordeaux and specifically, Lynch-Bages...’

In 1987, Jean-Michel Cazes joined the team at AXA, an insurance company with ambitious eyes on a number of top wine estates throughout the world, focusing on the Médoc, Pomerol, Sauternes, Portugal, Hungary and Burgundy. AXA’s goal of nurturing an investment portfolio of quality vineyards resonated with Cazes and he was soon named the director of the wine division and all the estates therein, including Super Second neighbour, Château Pichon Baron.

The capital injection from AXA marked the inauguration of Lynch-Bages’ new winemaking facility in 1989, propitiously timed with one of the best releases ever from the château. This seminal moment was the fulcrum at which long-held aspirations to play alongside Bordeaux’s very top-drawer manifested as a reality. The Cordeillan-Bages hotel and now Michelin-starred restaurant opened the same year.

Ambition continued to manifest as multitudinous destinies, with 1990 marking the first vintage of white wine Blanc de Lynch-Bages, before further investments elsewhere, including in the Languedoc with l’Ostal, the northern Rhône, Châteauneuf du Pape and even Australia (Tapanappa), took place from 2001. The Cazes family have since pulled out of their investment on these shores, although they remain good friends with Brian Croser and his family. Meanwhile, in 2005, an extensive programme of massage selection was instigated, using cuttings from vines in excess of 50 years. This serves to protect Lynch-Bages’ genetic patrimony while promoting the voice of the vineyard that the original vineyard material conveys. Moreover, genetic diversity ensures less exposure to disease, or adverse conditions that can easily devastate a vineyard planted to a limited number of clones. Today there is a ‘bank’ of several thousand biotypes of each of the major varieties planted. Concomitantly, geological studies were ramped up in 2009, leading to an enviable exactitude when it comes to harvest, fermentation, ageing decisions and geo-located fertilising, as a tractor equipped with a GPS places the compost within areas as tiny as a five-metre strip, depending on the information it gleans from the tracking device. Five main soil types have been identified. These include Garonne gravel, smatterings of clay and loam, limestone bedrock and limestone subsoil.

Understandably, by this point, Jean-Michel Cazes had exerted energy beyond compare, his omniscience the platform whence son Jean-Charles Cazes emerged as managing director of Lynch-Bages in 2006. Jean-Michel remains involved, however, heading the wine and tourism divisions of the operation, while operating a side hobby producing beer from the Cazes family Brasserie de Bages, aptly named D2, after the Médoc autoroute on which Lynch-Bages sits. Interestingly, the beer is aged in old Lynch-Bages barrels.

In 2017, Lynch-Bages began yet another renovation. This time the focus was on the winemaking facilities. Both technological advancements and contemporary trends embracing gentler parcel-by-parcel extraction techniques, saw the need for a new grape reception centre, gravity flow cellars and new vat rooms, with more than 80 stainless steel vats of various sizes, each to harbour a separate plot when necessary. The project, completed in 2021, was headed by lauded architects Chien Chung Pei and Li Chung Pei, the sons of the architect that designed the Louvre’s glass pyramid, I.M. Pei. The new cellars incorporate a glass roof, new offices and a terrace, resplendent with 360-degree views over the surrounding landscape. Also in 2017, the Cazes family purchased Château Haut Batailley, giving them in excess of 120 hectares of 1855 classified vineyard land.

So what does Lynch-Bages look like today?

Today, Lynch-Bages is sizeable, with circa 100 hectares. The ratio of plantings is 75% cabernet sauvignon, 17% merlot, 6% cabernet franc and 2% petit verdot. The vineyard area is divvied into two major sections. One abuts the château on the Bages plateau, elevated to a subtle rise of 20 metres. The other lies further north, with its superior terroir set on the Monferan plateau. There is also a smidgeon of vines near the Pauillac township and more, in the south-west of Pauillac, nudged against Château Pichon-Lalande, on the St. Julien border, lending themselves to an element of finesse. These, too, can be used in the Grand Vin. Thus, in essence, there are four blocks in all. 140 separate parcels have been identified within, since the extraordinarily detailed project of soil mapping began in 2009. The average vine age is 30 years, with older vines nudging 90. The density is typically Bordelais, at circa 9,000 vines per hectare. A mere six hectares, on the western side of holdings, are reserved for white cultivars: 53% sauvignon blanc, 32% semillon and 15% muscadelle. However, while the price befits Lynch-Bages’ stellar reputation, the white wine is sold as a generic Bordeaux Blanc AC. This is because the appellation laws of Pauillac do not allow for white wine.

But what about the wine?

The Grand Vin of Lynch-Bages is vinified in stainless steel. Malolactic conversion, however, occurs partially (30%) in oak, conferring a creaminess and integration of fruit and the egalitannins gleaned from the oak. The wine is then aged in French barriques for 12 to 15 months, 70% of which is new. Conversely, the white is vinified in an ambitious meld of new oak (50%), single-pass barrels (20%) and the rest, in stainless steel tank. It is then nourished with lees handling for at least six months. This imbues both a pungent reduction or mineral tension if you will, together with an expansive breadth across the palate. Like many top white Bordeaux, it represents among the greatest values of the fine wine world, ageing with ease across a decade or more.

Stylistically, the Grand Vin of Lynch-Bages is a wine of assertive, gravelly Pauillac tannins, chamois of texture in their youth, before softening to alloyed ballbearings that rumble across the palate with each sip, after cellaring. The Grand Vin is invariably powerful and with that, concentrated and intense, straddling a traditional structural lattice, with modern touches including the creamy oak integration delivered by the approach here to the malolactic conversion. The wine is indelibly marked with, what pundit Jane Anson calls, ‘nuanced layers of black fruits, tobacco, cedar and slate…’ Needless to say, the track record is profound, with good vintages ageing effortlessly for at least a decade-and-a-half before they really begin to strut their stuff. The development of each vintage in barrel or vat is monitored, too, with the ‘Winegrid’ system, adopted in 2015. This allows for a finer tuning of the cuvaison and its appropriation to the vintage conditions. This facilitates fruit expression as much as better polymerisation of tannins.

The best vintages of Lynch-Bages aside from the aforementioned 1989, include 1990, 1996 and more recently as the estate enters another halcyon period, 2009, 2010, 2015 and the prodigious triumvirate of 2018, 2019 and 2020.

So what else is going on?

The Cazes family’s energy continues to infuse the Bordeaux region at large. While it is a relatively common business model these days, the Cazes company VINIV was among the first operations, too, to arrange for customers to produce their own signature cuvées. With the assistance of Lynch-Bages winemakers, of course! The only prerequisite is that each customer buys the equivalent of at least a barrel of wine (25 cases). Given the popularity of the enterprise, the mandatory purchase seems to have proven little impediment to its success, suggesting strongly the allure of Lynch-Bages in the International fine wine marketplace.

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