FOCUS ON... Château Veyry

31/08/2023
In the age of TikTok and Instagram and Whatsapp and Twitter (or is it X now?) and so on and so forth, there is something very very pleasing about someone who cannot be found on the internet - although it doesn't make writing this sort of thing easy.

Richard describes Christian Veyry as, quite simply, "an inspiration to me for 25+ years." He has even made wine with him! And so for Bordeaux Wine Month 2023, rather than take a look at some of the big producers we all know (and some of whom we love) it might be more interesting to focus on someone working on a much smaller scale - exactly the type of winemaker we like best at Brompton Wine.

So here is the potted history: Christian Veyry is the son of a Bordeaux winemaker. His ‘day job’ is a wine consultant/oenologist helping Michel Rolland advise clients mostly in and around Saint-Emilion and Pomerol, which means he has an extraordinary knowledge of the area and its wine. By night, however, he runs a micro-winemaking facility.

He is a garagiste. This is one of my favourite wine terms, which popped up in Bordeaux during the nineties to describe a renegade group of winemakers making their wines at home, as a way of protesting against and working around the traditional barriers to entry of winemaking. These days it's a bit more of a general term, and usually means any extremely small scales winemakers who make wine in very small volumes without owning their own vines or cellars. It's no longer confined to France - California and Australia both now have garagiste cultures - but Bordeaux is where it originated, and in Christian's case it is apparently also literally true: according to the very few references I could find online, Christian's small but high-tech winery genuinely does live in his garage.

Christian (and his garage) are based in the Côtes de Castillon appellation. Côtes de Castillon is on the Right Bank, just beside St Émilion, and so he uses the same grapes as the better known neighbouring appellation, predominantly mainly Merlot and Cabernet Franc. His view is that tip-top quality, healthy grapes with rich phenolic structure leads to more complex flavours in the wines. He believes that higher alcohol means more layers - which is true but there is a fine line: get the alcohol level wrong and the wine tastes out of balance. Christian always gets it right. His attention to detail at every stage of the winemaking process is impressive and almost obsessive - which we mean as a real compliment.

There's so much more to Bordeaux than just the big names and brands, and Château Veyry is a perfect examplar. Search for Veyry on our website and see for yourself.