Ep 557: The Greats - Saint-Émilion of Bordeaux

Wine for Normal People

Alcohol, Lifestyle, Arts, Education, Food, Wine, Dining, Grapes

4.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As part of the series on the greatest wines in the world, I cover Saint-Émilion on the Right Bank of Bordeaux. With its legacy of winemaking, its unique terroir, and its small producers who are constantly innovating and improving, this region is indisputably one of the top in the wine world.

As with all the regions in "The Greats" series, I go in depth on the fascinating history of Saint-Émilion, the complex terroir, the (convoluted) classification, and the grapes and flavors that are possible from this outstanding "Great."

As promised, here are the Premiers Grands Crus Classes A & B from the 2022 Classification...

PREMIERS GRANDS CRUS CLASSES A
Château Figeac
Château Pavie

PREMIERS GRANDS CRUS CLASSES B

Château Beau-Sejour Becot
Château Beausejour Heritiers Duffau Lagarrosse
Château Belair Monange
Château Canon
Château Canon la Gaffeliere
Château Larcis Ducasse
Château Pavie Macquin
Château Troplong Mondot
Château Trottevieille
Château Valandraud
Clos Fourtet
La Mondotte

Sources used:

"Inside Bordeaux", Jane Anson

Les Vins de Saint-Émilion

The Wine Cellar Insider

"St Emilion: True grit", James Lawther, MW Decanter

"Ian D’Agata on the Great Wines of Saint-Emilion: Terroir and Grand Vins, to Be or Not to Be…" TerroirSense

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Wine for Normal People, the podcast for people who like wine, but not the snobbery that goes with it.
0:15.8	I'm your host Elizabeth Schneider, author of the Wine for Normal People book and Certified Wine Dork.
0:21.4	It's almost spring. You need to stock up on some new fresher wines for the warmer weather.
0:26.1	Why not shop whenever you want and get the wine delivered right to your door.
0:30.2	Go to my exclusive, awesome sponsor, Wine Access.com slash WFMP.
0:36.1	Wine Access is like walking into a wine store where every bottle is more
0:39.2	amazing than the next. Free shipping on orders more than $150. And if you go to wine access.com
0:44.6	slash normal, you can join my wine club and get four shipments a year of six amazing bottles that I
0:50.2	select for just 150 bucks, which includes shipping. Wine access.com slash normal and listen in the middle of the show for more details.
1:00.0	This week, I really went down the rabbit hole.
1:02.8	I'm not going to lie.
1:03.9	I need to give a ton of credit to my friend Jane Anson, who wrote the book Inside Bordeaux,
1:10.1	for a lot of the information that we are
1:12.7	about to explore on Saint-Illion. Now, what is so interesting about San Amelion is that it is on
1:19.6	the right bank of Bordeaux. It is one of the oldest appellations in Bordeaux. And it's a lot more
1:27.1	confusing and more intricate than I think a lot of people know.
1:32.2	It was more information than I thought. When you read about Sond and Leone, they talk about a couple of
1:37.7	different terroix and break it down into like two things. There's clay and there's limestone and
1:42.9	there's a little bit of sand.
1:51.6	And as I dug into this, I really gained an appreciation for the winemakers of Sanam Leone,
1:57.7	the complexity of Sanem Leone, and it made me excited to try some of these different wines side by side by side. In fact, I'm probably going to try to do a patron
2:01.9	mini class, for those of you who are patrons, where we try to find some stuff that is grown in
	...

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