Société Civile du Ch. Lafleur

The Société Civile du Ch. Lafleur is the collective name for the Guinaudeau family’s wines and estates. These are some of the Right Bank’s most famous wines, including Ch. Lafleur and Les Pensées in Pomerol, along with Les Perrières, Les Champs Libres and Ch. Grand Village in Fronsac.

The Guinaudeau family has a long history in the region; their ancestors established Ch. Grand Village in 1650 and bought Ch. Lafleur in 1872. Jacques and Sylvie Guinaudeau took over Ch. Lafleur in 1985 and have led the estate, and the family’s growing portfolio, into a new era.

Key to the character of the Lafleur wines is Bouchet. A once-popular local synonym for Cabernet Franc, they use the term to refer to their particular massal selections of the variety – with genetic material that pre-dates the devastating 1956 frost. Only a handful of vineyards on the Right Bank survived the attack (including plots at Lafleur, Ausone, Cheval Blanc and Angélus), and vineyards were largely replanted with lesser clones, selected for yield rather than quality.

Ch. Lafleur decided to propagate the few vines of Bouchet that had survived the frost, creating a nursery for these clones at Ch. Grand Village, protecting their viticultural heritage. For the Lafleur team, Bouchet is very different to other clones of Cabernet Franc, with better drought resistance and a flavour profile that sits somewhere between Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot – having a refined Cabernet-like tannic structure and freshness, yet not the herbaceous notes associated with Cabernet Franc. They feel it is key to the character of the wines, and today vine material from the three nurseries at Grand Village is used for their replanting programme.

Production across all six of their wines (find more on each of these below) is around 100-110,000 bottles a year, with no plan for volumes to increase. Winemaker and viticulturalist Omri Ram has been at the estate since 2013 and has only further improved quality across the entire portfolio.

The reds are all made similarly – with all the fruit hand-picked, de-stemmed and gentle extraction using only pump-overs. The wines are mainly fermented in stainless steel, with some cement, although this is being phased out in favour of stainless steel for ease of cleanliness and temperature control. They use an unusually low percentage of new French oak, with just 25-30% across the range.

This 4.5-hectare Pomerol estate makes some of the very finest wines in the region. Endlessly praised by critics and consumers (with the scores to match), it is hard to define quite what makes Lafleur so special. Pétrus and Le Pin get more press coverage, yet Lafleur – quietly – has a reputation for being one of the world’s most cerebral wines, deep, complex and perfumed.

Although the property is very close to Pétrus, the wines are extremely different. While Pétrus is 100% Merlot, the Lafleur vineyards are split equally between Merlot and Bouchet, with that proportion reflected in the final blend (consistently having one of the highest percentages of Cabernet Franc in Pomerol). The combination of its gravel soils and the Bouchet clone make for something truly special – a wine of mineral power and austerity in youth, yet one that ages beautifully. Indeed, tasted blind it almost feels more Left Bank in style. They did have a small plot of Cabernet Sauvignon, but this was uprooted in 2018.

Production is miniscule at around 10,000 bottles a year, with the tiny allocations of the wine selling out almost instantly en primeur. Ch. Lafleur is undoubtedly seen as the family’s Grand Vin, and the standard-bearer among its properties.

Les Pensées also comes from the Ch. Lafleur vineyards. Although it is often considered a second wine, it has evolved beyond this and is now a different expression of the Lafleur site.

First introduced in 1987 (soon after Jacques and Sylvie Guinaudeau took over), Les Pensées de Lafleur was initially a traditional second wine – made with fruit mainly from younger vines at Lafleur, conceived to preserve the quality of the Grand Vin. This was the case up to and including the 1999 vintage, when it changed.

From the 2000 vintage, the fruit comes exclusively from its own dedicated plot. This 0.68-hectare diagonal strip of clay in the Lafleur vineyards is considered a different Cru, it is an expression of Lafleur’s DNA on clay with a more classical Pomerol terroir. The wine was labelled as Les Pensées de Lafleur prior to 2018, when the “de Lafleur” was officially dropped (the same vintage that Les Perrières was introduced).

Les Champs Libres is the top white wine in the Lafleur portfolio. It’s an expression of Sauvignon Blanc on limestone soils, from specific parcels in Fronsac. Although the family experimented with the style in 2012 (under the name A Louima), the first commercial release was the 2013 vintage.

The vine material was sourced carefully from Sancerre, and the specific plots used are A Louima, Les Pêchers and Les Acacias, with Mathilde added from the 2014 vintage, totalling 0.7 hectares. The fruit is hand-picked with a double sorting in the vineyard.

The grapes are immediately pressed off their skins under low pressure and barrel-fermented in new oak. The wine spends eight months on fine lees, with gentle stirring for the first five months to build a creamy texture. A small percentage of Semillon is sometimes included in the blend.

Volumes, as with all the Lafleur wines, are regrettably small.

Ch. Grand Village is best known as the historic family estate of the Guinaudeau family, with Jacques and Sylvie still living there today. Situated in Mouillac, in the northern part of Fronsac, on Bordeaux’s Right Bank, the property was established by the family in 1650. Considering the wines of Grand Village share the same vine material as the vines at Lafleur and is managed by the same team, they remain very well priced for their pedigree.

Today the estate comprises 20 hectares of vineyards planted mainly to Merlot and Bouchet (an old Bordeaux clone of Cabernet Franc). In the early 1990s they also started to plant both Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon. The soils here are clay-limestone.

The family produces a white and red under the Fronsac estate’s name. The Grand Village red blend varies from vintage to vintage, but tends to be between 75 and 85% Merlot and 15 to 25% Bouchet.

For the white, half is barrel-fermented in one- and two-year-old barrels and aged for eight months, while the rest is fermented in stainless steel tanks. The wine has light lees stirring for the first five months. The exact blend changes each vintage but is typically 70 to 80% Sauvignon Blanc and 20 to 30% Semillon.

With new plots in Fronsac on the plateau de Meyney coming on stream, the family has uprooted some lesser parcels at Grand Village that no longer meet their standards. The winery was renovated in 2021 and production of the Grand Village wines is around 40-60,000 bottles a year.

Made from 2009 to the 2017 vintages inclusive, Acte was an experimental series bottled under the Guinaudeau label to trial the concept for Les Perrières.

They wanted to test the theory of Lafleur on limestone while trying to find the right sites for Les Perrières, and decided to create a wine using fruit from limestone-dominant parcels at Ch. Grand Village. The releases are numbered, with 2009 Acte 1 and so on.