Château d’Esclans: Would you pay for rosé that tastes like Burgundy?

By Joanna Simon

Joanna Simon tastes five vintages of two of the world’s most expensive rosés, Garrus and Les Clans, siblings of Whispering Angel, and asks the question: is it worth it?

In the early 2000s, the French were drinking more white wine than rosé.

By 2008, however, mainstream media were reporting that sales of rosé had overtaken those of white for the first time. Since then rosé has swept the wine world.

The production and consumption of rosé has been increasing worldwide.

And styles are inevitably changing. Rosé is serious business and a serious wine. There are now rosés that can be cellared and aged.

Sea change

If there’s one man who can take the credit for this sea change, it’s Sacha Lichine.

In 2006, he created Whispering Angel, a Côtes de provence rosé that he describes today as ‘closer to a spirits brand.’ as well as two oak-fermented rosés. Garrus and Les Clans, from his estate Château d’Esclans.

While he originally went on the property reecce in search of the sun, his vision became to create the world’s most expensive rosé, a wine of elegance and precision, complexity and ageability, that could hold its own among other fine wines – whites, reds and not least Burgundy.

The estate’s vineyards are in the limestone-rich soils of the upper Esclans valley in the Var department, wich he leased and then finally bought in 2005 after selling Château Prieuré-Lichine, in Margaux, in 1999.

Developing the style of a fine rosé

The technical director Lichine recruited to realise this vision was a Bordeaux winemaker, Patrick Léon, recently retired from Château Mouton Rothschild.

But the inspiration for the winemaking of Garrus and Les Clans was white Burgundy:fermentation and ageing in new oak with twice weekly batonnage.

There has been fine tuning over the years. Both fermentation and maturation are now in 600-litre demi-muids, instead of 500-litre barrels, and each is individually temperature controlled.

The wines are aged for 10 months and the oak is a mix of new, second and third use. Most of the barrels are from coopers Seguin Moreau, critically, they’re only very lightly toasted.

Other fundamentals include picking in the cool early morning, a three-stage grape sorting process, cooling the grapes down to 7°C-8°C, and a closed-circuit ultra-light pressing process that results in very pale, basically free-run juice (85%-90% in the case of Les Clans).

The average vine age is 50-70 years for Les Clans and ‘a little bit older’ for Garrus, according to Lichine.

Where they diverge radically from Burgundy is of course in their grape varieties: 78%-80% Grenache ‘for elegance’, says Lichine, and 18%-20% Rolle ‘for richness’.

There is a smidgen of Syrah and there could be a tad of Tibouren and Cinsault.

Making wine that sells

‘Everyone bought I was off my head to sell a fourth-growth Bordeaux to do this,’ says Lichine.

What they didn’t appreciate is that Sacha Lichine not only knows how to make wine and run an estate, he knows how to sell wine.

It may be the less romantic side of the wine business (although it can be glamorous at the upper echelons), but it was key to Esclans’ success and the subsequent global rise of rosé.

Has Lichine achieved what he set out to do? In my view, yes. The wines are rich and vinous yet elegan, and they become more complex with age.

Garrus, especially, starts out more like Burgundy, and become more like red Burgundy with age, wich surely can’t be bad.

Are they worth the money? Only you can decide what to spend your money on, but their quality compares with wines of equivalent price.

Notes and scores for five vintages of Garrus and Les Clans