Forget claiming that Château Phélan Ségur merely competes with the $150+ titans (Cos d’Estournel, Montrose, Calon-Ségur) of Saint-Estèphe. In fact, Left Bank connoisseurs and collectors should listen to the following with rapt attention: If the historic Bordeaux Classification of 1855 were to ever be amended, I’d bet the farm that Phélan Ségur would earn an enviable Grand Cru Classé position.
The consistently high quality of their recent releases and their proximity to châteaux Calon-Ségur and Montrose make it hard to argue against my position, but tasting this release makes it downright impossible. This harmonious combination of year (2015) and terroir (gravelly clay) flaunts luxurious purity, savory muscle, and a decidedly powerful terroir imprint—and when it comes to terroir, Phélan Ségur has some of the region’s most valuable. Here’s a prime example: When they put 22 hectares of vines on the market in 2010, Second Growth Montrose leaped at the opportunity, spending over $1 million per hectare—at the time, nobody in Saint-Estèphe had ever spent more on vines. So while you’re certainly welcome to spend two to four times more on Montrose, it’s hard to justify when a perfectly stored bottle of Phélan Ségur’s extraordinary 2015 is within reach.
NOTE: This limited parcel will be arriving at our warehouse in mid-November.
Just north of Pauillac, where the majority of Bordeaux First Growths are found, lies the commune of Saint-Estèphe. Here, three names are instantly recognizable to Bordeaux cognoscenti: Second Growths Cos d’Estournel and Montrose and Third Growth Calon-Ségur. Tasting a wine from a storied terroir such as Saint-Éstephe is a soul-stirring experience that cannot be replicated outside the region, but once you do finally locate that bottle, and still have a padded wallet, that’s the turning point—the switch that opens your eyes to blue-chip Bordeaux. Enter Phélan Ségur: The affordable gems being produced at this château have the elegance, structure, and cellaring power to exist alongside those nearby powerhouses.
The origin story of Château Phélan Ségur begins in the late 1700s when Irishman Bernard O’Phelan wed the daughter of an illustrious wine merchant. At the turn of the 19th century, Bernard purchased two estates and combined them to form Château Ségur de Garramey. Upon the succession of his son Frank in 1841, the family was one of the largest landholders in the region. Frank, who also served as the mayor of Saint-Estèphe for three decades, built the château that still stands today, and soon after his death, the property was renamed Phélan Ségur. Following several ownership changes in the 1900s, the Gardinier family took over in 1985 and oversaw 30+ vintages, including today’s 2015, before a massive acquisition by Philippe Van de Vyvere—the largest-ever sale for a Cru Bourgeois property—in 2017.
Today, the estate controls 70 hectares of vines that are divided into four sprawling sections, many of which are adjacent to those of Montrose and Calon-Ségur. Cabernet Sauvignon makes up nearly 60% of those plantings, followed by Merlot and just a smattering of Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. Not only do they experiment with organic farming—still quite rare in Bordeaux—but they were also an early advocate for banning pesticides, which haven’t tainted their soils since the ’90s. For today’s 2015, each parcel was hand-harvested and fermented in a battery of stainless steel tanks before tasting and blending. Following, the wine was transferred into lightly toasted French barrels, 50% new. In total, roughly 16 months of maturation passed before bottling. The tranche on offer today just arrived from Bordeaux.
As enticing as it is to taste Phélan Ségur’s 2015 after pulling the cork and smelling the first wave of aromas, I urge you to pour it into your most oxygen-friendly decanter and wait no less than 60 minutes before stealing your first sip. The nose spills out dense, intoxicating aromas of black raspberry, huckleberry, black cherry, and spiced plum that exist in a prominent, non-fruit backbone of tobacco leaf, anise, cigar wrapper, potting soil, pencil lead, crushed graphite, cacao, wet gravel, and cloves. The medium-plus-bodied palate is a muscular tour de force that delivers compact, fine-grained layers of dark-hued berries, savory earth, and a mesmerizing blend of spices. This is still a baby at six years old, but it shows incredible length, nuance, and profundity that promises to guide it into a beautiful evolution over the next 5, 10, even 20 years. We hope you enjoy this Saint-Estèphe beauty as thoroughly as we did. Cheers!
