The Caretaker Who Saved Château Lafite's Cellar | Saskia de Rothschild [Part One]

Chateau Lafitte Rothschild, it is one of the five first growths here in Bordeaux. A classification decided in 1855 that has stood for 170 years and is still defined the very top of fine wine in the world today. Baron James de Rothschild bought this estate in 1868. He visited once and sadly passed away a few months later but his family has loved and protected it ever since. Today I have the privilege of visiting Saskia de Rothschild who is sixth generation CEO and the first woman in this family to do it. We're in the vines, we're going into the tasting room and we're opening some of the most extraordinary bottles I've ever had the privilege of tasting. So welcome to the episode of Lafitte, let's go. Saskia, thank you so much for having me here today. Where are we? So we're in Lafitte in Pauillac and I'm happy to welcome you here to tell you a little bit about what we do and what interesting times we're going through. Yeah and before we start with kind of tomorrow, I want to talk about the history too because you're sixth generation, right? So your family bought this in, was it 1868? Yeah. Right, so can you talk me a little bit through the history? Yes sure, so Baron James de Rothschild acquired Lafitte in 1868. He arrived from the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt and he wanted to integrate into France and he thought that having roots here and having a vineyard would make him more French and so he acquired Lafitte. He came only once, I found out. He visited once. Yeah, he visited once and actually if you look at the archives, he visited when it was the harvest and then he died of jaundice, poor guy. But I think he had a good vision because when you look at the risk maps of vineyards and how this place maps out in the next 100 years, you realize that Lafitte is the least risk averse of our vineyards. It's the place where actually because of the terroir, because of where we are with the ocean, the river, it's very protected and so I think that he had this vision of having an estate that was for the family in the long run and that's what happened. And the way that you came on board is very interesting, right? Because you have a Master's in Journalism from Columbia and you were a freelance correspondent, right, for the New York, International New York Times. You were interviewing just, I mean, you're covering politics and elections in West Africa and your dad called you, didn't he? And he's invited you to come to the Chateau for a blending, right? It's not, it's a little bit more, it's a bit less poetic than that but not too far. No, I have two brothers and we grew up spending, of course, a lot of time here with my dad and I was the one who loved wine since I was a kid and so I was always with him tasting, with him in the vineyard. Sounds like me and my dad. And so I had this passion for wine and for what was happening here but I wanted to tell the stories of other people and so I left and I lived, yeah, I lived abroad for a while. I lived in Argentina, I lived in India and I was a correspondent in West Africa for the NYT and I think that there was a moment where my father was getting a little bit older and he was starting to think of the future and he said, look, maybe you should come back more than once a year because I would always come back in January for blending and so that's when I thought, okay, should I do this, should I not? And we talked a lot with the family because there's six branches of our family who are owners and yeah, I went back to school. I went to viticulture and oenology school and under my mom's name, far from Bordeaux and yeah, and started working with my dad and moved from Abidjan to Pauillac, to here. I was going to say, you're the first generation to have actually moved here as well. Yeah, and now I'm in between because of... Yeah, we'll get to all of the other genions. But yeah, I think it was really important, you know, when you start to work in a world like this and because I was fascinated by the vineyard, I wanted to understand this and to spend time here and so I needed to be here. I really needed to be here with all the new approach we wanted to have, the change to organic farming that was a big step for a vineyard in Bordeaux. You've made a lot of changes over the last one. Yeah, and at the end, you know, there's an Italian philosopher who says everything has to change for nothing to change and I think that Il faut que tout change pour que rien ne change. It's called Lampedusa and I think that he's right. At the end of the day, if we want to keep making the wines that Lafite should be making, there are evolutions that we need to be making. And you are the youngest CEO of First Growth. Yeah. And most people would probably think that you don't spend much time in the vineyard and here and yet you live here and you studied oenology and we're here amongst the vines. We need to talk a little bit about the terroir here because I know it is so unique. You see, and we'll go on the other side, on the Plateau de Lafite afterwards, but the Médoc, everyone always thinks that it's very flat, but you see that there's actually important slopes and it comes from the Quaternary era and there's two rivers, which are the Garonne and the Dordogne that took alluvions from the Pyrenees and the Massif Central and that's what makes this soil so interesting. It's this complexity, the fact you have these two sources that are bringing this terroir and when you're traveling through the Médoc, you see there's these pockets of incredible terroir that are along the way and so even a small decline means a lot in this place and Lafite, why Lafite is like it is and why it tastes more delicate than maybe its neighbors that are great wines like Latour or Mouton, is really because of the grave we have, the gravelly soils that we have that make it always lighter on its toes, quite low alcohol. Last year we had a wine that was 12.5% and very drinkable. So if you look at the different eras of Lafite and if you look at the development of the wine world, one important time in Bordeaux was of course the end of the Second World War because the area was very bombarded during the war and so it was my... They all tried to attack a lot of the chateaus, right? No, and some of the chateaus were also, because our family was Jewish, our estate was taken and handled by German officers during the war. Not know that. Yeah, and the wines were saved thanks to an incredible woman who was the caretaker, who walled all of the old vintages and who actually forged the accounts saying that the wines belonged to my grandpa and his brother who were prisoners of war. And that allowed for the fact that a lot of the bottles were saved and so she had a little house next to mine over there until she was dead and she was very well taken care of by all the family for everything she saved. And so she was called Gabby. She was a great woman. Yeah, it saved history. And so yeah, so Elie arrived, Baron Elie arrived in 45 and he had to rebuild and develop. And then the 70s, my father arrived in 74 and those were years my dad always says, I didn't sell a bottle of wine the first year I worked here. And the cellars were full of wine and it was really bad years for Bordeaux. And then the 80s came, the Americans started drinking, Japanese and he really developed. So you have Elie who was in charge of restoring and rebuilding my dad that was really the developer. And then I arrived and I feel like the protector, you know, like in the fact that what's been done before is incredible and how do we manage to continue what we've been doing? Yeah. So these are new vines that we're planting with the old Massal selection of Lafite and I want to take you to a plot of Cabernet Franc that we just planted because it also... It's like Boucher. So Lafleur call it Boucher and we're great friends with them. So you can call it Boucher if you want. I just call it Cabernet Franc but it is Cabernet Boucher. You know I can't pronounce many French words so I might stick with Cabernet Franc as well. And so it's a plant actually Cabernet Franc is a varietal that there was actually quite a lot of at Lafite in the past and then in the 80s, you know, everyone started thinking that Merlot was this great, great grape. Yes. Because Left Bank is more Cab Sav anyway. Yeah. So the star in Lafite is Cabernet Sauvignon. Yeah. It's like... It's like 70%. No, no, no. Planted there's about 80% but in the wines right now, the wines that we're making, there's like 94%. Really? Because people would typically think that yeah, like Cab Sav is so... It is like full-bodied and robust and Merlot can kind of add that more like delicate features but you guys somehow like... Do you think it's to do with the soil? The Cabernet Sauvignon you make here on the Plateau de Lafite is like the most soft and refined and... Yeah. Because you're at the end of the kind of... Of the Groupe de Grave and also it's old vines that take their pace here. Yeah. Make very, very delicate and exceptional Cabernet Sauvignon. And every time we taste those we have a hard time adding things to them. So it's really... Yes, we add a little bit of Merlot. We always add 1% of Petit Verre d'Eau because we have an old plot of Petit Verre d'Eau that always adds a little bit of something. I believe that Cabernet Franc will be a big part of the blendings of the future. Yeah. For now... I think it's the winemakers right at the moment. So when you do a Massal selection either you take your best Pony and you multiply it in a row or you do more like a fruit salad and you take the diversity of the vines that you like... You take a lot of them and you plant them. You plant them in a scattered way. Yeah, it's kind of like hedging your bets, right? Exactly. Either you're very Darwinian, you plant the best and you say, okay, I think this is my horse or you... So like in many things we didn't decide either one or the other so we do both. So here in these rows we're planting by type of individual and then here we planted a more diversified population. Fruit salad. Exactly, the Macedoine, we call it. So that's our Macedoine and that here is more our great horse approach. Yeah, and we'll see how it goes. You are doing something where it's like you're kind of trading butternut practices in every alternating row. It's quite vigorous. No, so to explain this you have to... When I arrived in 2016 to Poyac I was fascinated by biodynamics and by the wines that I loved. Some of them were biodynamic and so I thought how do I take this quite philosophical approach to a very rational team here? And so instead of looking like I was a witch I said, look, let's do it very rationally and let's do an experimental approach of doing blocks where we are in organic and blocks where we are in biodynamic. And in the same vine we're going to take one of our best vines which is a vine that always makes Lafite and we're going to separate it in orange and green zones that we call and on the biodynamic we'll do the Saint-Saëns and the Saint-Saëns and on the organic we'll just approach it like a usual organic farming approach. And it was really interesting because from the first year there was a real difference. In the acidity we harvested the biodynamic later. Was one better than the other? So we tasted blind. I'm not going to tell you everyone was like wow, it's incredible but they both went into Lafite. We found out that there is a real impact on the way the vine and the grape protects itself if it has biodynamic treatments in the thickness of the skin and in the mineral composition and you really see a difference. Yeah, I think that's a perfect segue to talking about terroir, right? Because the idea of terroir on the land here isn't so much communicated in the world of Bordeaux it might be a little bit more in place like Burgundy or even like Champagne. Bordeaux people are obsessed with terroir and I think that sometimes we forget that and we know our terroir very well but because we blend different identities sometimes people think why are you obsessed with terroir and then you take this and this and put it together. To me that is what makes us a little bit different is the fact that we blend our plots but when you harvest Lafite we harvest 59 blocks and they're vinified separately and then we taste each of them and we always do the first tasting blind and the terroir message in each of these plots is incredible. And everything we're doing in terms of the vigor of the vine, the cover crops you see, you taste it right away and you can analyze it and when you want it better we did a whole work on all of this area to try and really up the quality of this vineyard and we were doing all these comparative tastings and so you really see the difference but what's true is that afterwards you say what I want to be making is the best Lafite in this given climate and so you have the legacy of the place and the legacy of the wines you've made before that comes into your mind a lot and that comes into your mind as much as the terroir does so it goes together. We just had on the 14th of July which is National Day a big hailstorm here. Yeah, were you affected? Yeah, it never hails in Lafite. Last time I was actually working in the cellar here it was 2011 and that was the last time it had hailed in Saint-Esteve on the 8th of September so it almost never hails but it hailed on the 14th of July and actually we hadn't trimmed the vines so we had this kind of bush of protection that we had meant to protect from the sun but it really helped us against the hail. You're experiencing heatwaves like you never had before so how are you looking to kind of mitigate kind of climate change in the future? Yeah, I think so first it's adapting your mindset and saying what do I expect from a vineyard and I think that the 80s made everyone think that a vineyard had to be extremely productive and it's taking one step back and saying I have to have a vineyard that lives on and that actually maybe my yields will be lower but my vineyard will survive. Yeah and so it's really looking for a more robust model rather than a more productive model and so it means we'll have to produce less wine. I was gonna say that's kind of counterintuitive right in this market. I think a safer bet for the future because if your vine is in a better place and is more adapted it will be able to live longer. Yeah. So that's the first thing is really you have to change your mindset and say okay maybe my yields will be different and more varied but I'll have a vine that will be able to make wine every year. Yeah. So that's first the key element and then it's adapting the height, adapting the density. So the density of planting we're looking at with the Poyac appellation to be allowed to plant until 5,000 or 6,000 vines per hectare. Yeah. To get this adaptation. It raises an interesting question whether kind of outdated laws or like laws should be amended in order to kind of meet the challenges of the current climate. Yeah I think laws have to adapt and I'm completely in favor of that. I think that we consider that you need to bring water into our vineyard only in extreme situations. And for young vines at this stage to really have your vines survive and so that's what we've been doing. The appellations in general in Bordeaux have had the authorization of declaring certain plots where they can bring water. Yeah. That's what we've done. So shut off. Yeah. This is Nola. Nola. Hello. There's nothing better than a vineyard dog. It's very important in winemaking this. You think you like something and you think you expect something from what you taste and then when you actually taste it's a very different story. So it takes a village you know. It takes different spirits that talk to make Lafite. And sometimes we talk about philosophy sometimes we talk about family and at the same time you're tasting. It's long sessions and long debates but it brings the harmony you know. The difference and the diversity of everyone's approach in tasting makes what Lafite is. Well shall we go and come and taste some? Let's go.