Château Lafleur Cult Wine Investment

Revered Pomerol estate Château Lafleur has rocked the French wine world by leaving the Pomerol appellation.

Lafleur’s owners announced just before the 2025 French harvest began that they would be labelling the six wines of the property as simply Vin de France, and eschewing the Pomerol and Bordeaux names. This starts with the 2025 vintage. While being careful to respect their peers in the region, the owners said they could no longer stick to the rules that govern wine production in Pomerol, set out by the INAO, the national institute for appellations of origin. The laws forbid irrigation, except in rare cases where a special dispensation is approved for all.

Of course, the reason they want to irrigate is not to increase their tonnages (no-one making thousand dollar a bottle wine wants to do that), but to sustain their vines during periods of excessive heat and drought, which are becoming more frequent and are expected to be increasingly common and problematic in future. Over-stressed vines do not produce great wine.

I have spoken to several Australian winemakers about these issues with some interesting insights.

For decades, Australian viticulture has regarded irrigation as important, if not essential, to growing healthy vines and quality grapes. With most of our wine regions normally experiencing a dry summer, irrigation has become the norm. Methods of irrigation were refined over the decades to make more efficient use of water (no more flood irrigation) and improve the delivery and timing of water to the vine roots. The most quality conscious producers do not over-water, but use irrigation as a supplement to natural rainfall in situations when it could make the difference between a decent crop and a significant loss.

However, scratch the skin of many top winemakers and you find a surprising number of our best vineyards are not irrigated. Yarra Yering, Wendouree, Bass Phillip, Yangarra, Moss Wood, Kaesler, Alkina. Very old vines especially in the Barossa are often unirrigated: their deep roots sustain them in dry periods. Very old vines often have deep root systems partly because they were planted and raised before irrigation became widely available.

Winemakers such as Gippsland-based Patrick Sullivan use unwatered vineyards, whether established or newly planted, because they believe the quality is higher and production is more consistent—deep rooted vines can sail through excessively wet periods as well as dry, because they don’t rely on surface roots like many modern irrigated vineyards.

Sullivan, and fellow Gippsland producer Bass Phillip, are helped in this by the region’s climate, which has high humidity, high rainfall, and good year-round distribution—very rare in Australia.

Sydney-based winemaker Alex Head, who makes wine in the Barossa but doesn’t own vines or a winery, believes irrigation is a negative, as it decreases total acidity in the grapes. This is because irrigation provides water to the berries, the berries then respire more water, and along with the water, acids. He finds grapes from unirrigated vines have higher acidity which is increasingly valuable in a warming world, and means that there is less need to correct acidity during winemaking. He thinks adjusted acid can be tasted in many Australian wines, and prefers to avoid it in his own wines. In tandem with this thinking, Head has for some years been gradually shifting his grape sourcing to Eden Valley, which is higher and cooler than the Barossa floor. Eden Valley grapes tend to make more elegant wines and to retain more of their natural acidity.

Head also guesses that a second reason for Lafleur wanting to have the freedom to water its vines could be that irrigation retards ripening, and time on the vine is important to develop the right flavours. Harvest—not only in Bordeaux but in most of the world’s wine regions—has been starting earlier and earlier, which means the hang-time, or time between budburst and harvest, is shortening.

Lafleur also wants to be able to give its vines more space: the present Pomerol AOC requires at least 5,500 vines per hectare, and Lafleur maintains the vines need an area better suited to the water availability in the soils. There is also a minimum canopy height, and Lafleur wants the freedom to adjust that—so there is less leaf area and less water loss.

Lafleur had been working on all of this and more for a long time but the super-dry 2025 season in Bordeaux was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Jane Anson has written a detailed article on the Lafleur matter. Click here to read.