A Kilometre From d’Yquem.
Breathtaking Bordeaux Blanc Best Buy for 14 Years Straight.

Dear Artisans,

Every year since the debut vintage in 2012, this has been the best selling Bordeaux Blanc in our shop. Not one of the best — the best, every single year, without a marketing push. Customers buy a bottle, come back for 12+, and then start giving it to people.

The reason is an accident of geography that somebody finally decided to exploit.

In 2011 Olivier Bernard of Domaine de Chevalier bought a property in the heart of Sauternes, on land that had been growing Semillon for centuries for one purpose: turning it into some of the most expensive sweet wine on the planet. Bernard looked at the same fruit and asked a different question. What if you picked it before the botrytis arrived and made a bone-dry white with it?

Look at where the vineyards actually sit.

The map below is a screenshot, not a marketing illustration. Clos des Lunes is pinned in the middle. Chateau d’Yquem is about a kilometre in one direction. Chateau Guiraud is about a kilometre in the other. Chateau d’Arche is closer still. This is the most valuable white-wine dirt in France, and the estate sits in the middle of it growing the same grape on the same gravel and clay-limestone.

Sixty hectares across Sauternes, Bommes and Barsac. Seventy percent Semillon for flesh and texture, thirty percent Sauvignon Blanc for lift. Hand-harvested in successive passes, whole-cluster pressed, settled by gravity, then six to seven months on the fine lees with regular batonnage. The vineyards went into organic conversion in 2023. Same team, same standards and the same obsessive fruit selection as Domaine de Chevalier — because it is literally the same people.

In 2023 they skipped malolactic fermentation entirely to hold the acidity against the summer heat, which is the single decision that makes this vintage sing. Six critics reviewed it and not one went below 90.

Same dirt. Same team.
Wildly different receipt.

Comparison prices are current US market averages for the 2023 vintage and are not our prices.

Olivier Bernard’s own Pessac-Leognan white will run you around a hundred and twenty dollars. His neighbour’s dry white, Ygrec, the bottle d’Yquem makes when it is not making dessert wine, is roughly two hundred and fifty. Both are magnificent and we sell them happily.

This is the same man, the same team and the same corner of Sauternes, at nineteen ninety-nine. I have never been able to explain the gap and I have stopped trying to.

White peach, nectarine and grapefruit up front, with pear and a little coriander seed behind them and a chalk-dust note that gives the whole thing its spine. The Semillon does the heavy lifting on texture (satiny, medium to full-bodied, genuinely mouth-filling) and the Sauvignon Blanc keeps snapping it back into focus.

Then there is the saline finish, which is the part that makes people put the glass down and look at the bottle. Suckling called it “a growing saline note that adds complexity, turning incisive yet textural.” Galloni found chalk and dried herbs and “a ton of character.” It drinks like a wine that costs four times as much — which is the only real complaint anybody has about it.

60 Bottles · Landing Thursday · Last Of The 2023

All six reviews,
word for word.

Fourteen straight years
as our number one white Bordeaux.

Sixty bottles land on Thursday and we are taking orders now. This is the last of the 2023 that we will see — and 2023 is the vintage with no malolactic and six reviews at 90 or better. The 2024 will be its own thing.

A dry white from the middle of Sauternes, made by the Domaine de Chevalier team, a kilometre from d’Yquem, for less than twenty dollars. Buy a case. Every year, the people who buy one bottle come back for six, and by then it is usually gone.

Sante,

— James Tran

60 Bottles · $19.99 · Landing Thursday

Call 650-917-8080, text 650-880-3553, email sales@artisan.wine, or chat with us