The best (French) wine for $100!

Today, we're tasting one of my favorite wines in the entire world. What a day! I'm sharing this secret with you, a top Chateau from the Bordeaux region, and a very good value proposition at about $100. It's not cheap, of course, but this may very well be the best way to spend $100 on a bottle of high-end Bordeaux wine and on a bottle of wine full stop in general. It's deep, it's elegant, it will age for decades. How and why is it worth the money? And why do I love it so much? Let's find out... Hello bonjour and welcome to a new Bon Appetit private wines video brought to you by the best wine club in America. I can't wait to get tasting this wine and enjoying a glass of it after shooting this video. I'm your host, Julien Miquel, Bordeaux trained French winemaker, and yes, I learned how to make fine wine in Bordeaux and in Margaux, specifically on the left bank of the Garonne river, the appellation where arguably the finest Bordeaux wines are made. They are certainly some of my favorites. I personally worked at the finest wine estate in Margaux, Chateau Margaux, so I know a thing or two about it, and where to find a good wine. So why am I presenting you this very wine? Not to sell it to you, or our wine club has an amazing offering of incredible wines that we import to the US exclusively for our members, and we take great care picking the wines that we get, but we never imported this one. We go for more exclusive small producers that are not seen in the US. This is in the US and you can easily find it. This is one I know and love just personally at an individual level from my experience and career in Margaux and in the wine industry. So what is Chateau Giscourt? Let's talk about it... Chateau Giscourt is widely regarded as one of the best value propositions in Margaux, primarily because it consistently over delivers in quality for a third growth price point. While it was officially ranked as a Troisième Cru Classé, so a third growth in the 1855 classification of the wines of Médoc, you can actually watch my dedicated video about that famed classification of French wines right here, its performance over the last few decades, two decades or so, particularly under the management of Alexander Van Beek, Van Beck, it's how you say it, has seen it rival some of the more prestigious second growth in both critical acclaim and just the quality of the wine. The estate's value lies in its rather massive 100 hectare vineyard, 250 acres, I mean it's not unseen in Médoc but it's a significant estate situated on a deep high elevation gravel plateau near the village of Margaux. This terroir provides the natural drainage and the heat retention necessary for Cabernet Sauvignon to reach peak ripeness, peak maturity, and the clay gives it finesse. Unlike some of its neighbors that command astronomical prices based on historical labels, Giscourt often retails around from $70 to $110 depending on the vintage, even when scoring 95 plus points from Cretex. I personally worked with Chateau Giscourt as well, I must disclose, which also explains why I've got some emotional attachment to this estate. The footage I'm featuring here is one I shot myself personally with my own equipment, my own hands, my own drone. I first worked making fine wine with Chateau Giscourt when I worked making a Super Tuscan wine with them on a property that they owned in Tuscany some 20 years ago, and I later worked at Chateau Giscourt on their social media strategy as more of an influencer, which I was a few years back. So I know Alexander Van Beek pretty well. So let's get tasting and talk about what this wine tastes like, and what you should expect for your $100. Well, first of all, we have a wine with a really vibrant red color. It's looking really dark and deep and intense, but what really strikes when you look at it is how youthful and crisp the color really looks like. It's a six-year-old wine at this point, but it looks like it's just out of the barrel. No orange brick hues to it at this point, so no signs of evolution whatsoever. Just vibrant red, looking very young, very youthful. Let's smell. Wow! Yeah, it makes me melt every time. Wow! It smells extremely nice and very deep. I love how the first sniff, you're directly emerged into an ocean of dark chocolate, soft and profound aromas of coffee, of caramel. It smells like the inside of a nice toasted barrel made from the finest oak. But it's not that it smells only or too much of oak. It smells like fruits as well, and wine, dark fresh berries. Yeah, somewhat of a strawberry jelly, cinnamon, nutmeg, mixed spices. There's a bit of a peach element, really really fruity brioche, but all surrounded by a creamy chocolate, sweet caramel. It's amazingly complex, captivating. You could spend, or I could spend, minutes smelling this wine again and again, and describing more and each and every component. I would never run out of things to say. It's so deep and complex, but I'll leave it here. I just love smelling this wine. Let's move on to the palate. Oh wow! It's really good. What strikes on the first sensation on the palate first is the smoothness of the tannins, the texture. Have you heard of that term, finely grained wine or fine grain wine? How some wines have those very fine grains of tannins that you feel. This is a perfect example of that. The tannins are very dense and compact. You can feel they're really big and dense. You sense that the wine is dense and concentrated, but that it has a lot of tannins. But you don't really feel the harshness that some other wines have, bigger wines have, because those tannins are soft, they're velvety, they're silky, because the vines and the clay in the terroir has delivered tannins that are mild on their edges. The aging in oak barrels, the maturation, has mellowed those tannins even further. The cooler climate of Bordeaux doesn't give too much of a punch or too much alcohol either. So it's quite mellowed and soft. The result is a wine that is extremely textural and dense, silky, like the finest Grand Cru chocolate you've ever tasted, or the mildest coffee you've ever drunk. The concentration of flavors is also astonishing. Incredible depth, huge explosion of ripe berries, blackberry coulis, strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, tons of intense spices as well, black pepper, nutmeg, cardamom. You feel the deep intense influence of Cabernet Sauvignon in a fine texture. The cassis or the blackcurrant that is so typical of Cape Sauve, the smoothness of Merlot and the dark cherry from Merlot on the background too. All in all, what I love in a good Margot wine, and what it's famous for, is the finesse of delivery, how the fruitiness gets delivered with assertiveness and convection, with density and concentration, but at the same time with a je ne sais quoi of refinement, of floral character, a unique silkiness for the good examples and the good vintages, an iron fest in a velvet glove is the best way to describe it. This level of refinement, this density combined with the age-worthiness of a great Chateau from Bordeaux, such a wine will get better and better for about 20 years or so, so another solid 15 years for this particular 2020 vintage. You can forget a bottle like this in your cellar for 10-15 years and open it then, and the wine will only be better for it. All of these qualities combined at this level is quite rare for a wine, and it's even rarer for a Bordeaux wine at $100 a bottle. It's not cheap as I said, but you know, you pay for what you get, and I believe this is a pretty good value for $100. Here you have it, my thoughts on Chateau Giscourt vintage 2020. Learn more about Margot, the Appellation and all the Bordeaux wines with those videos right here, and stay tuned to the channel. I will see you soon in the wonderful world of wine. Au revoir. Cheers. Ciao, ciao...