Wine Review: Instant Becot AOC Bordeaux 2018

For our tasting today David Allen MW, Wine-Searcher’s Wine Director tastes a wine that caught his attention as being from producers whose wines he loves. The wine is an AOC Bordeaux called Instant Becot, the wine is from the 2018 vintage.

The Becot Family are owners of Château Beau-Séjour Bécot, a Bordeaux producer in Saint-Émilion, with a Premier Grand Cru Classé B status. The grand vin is, as one would expect, a Merlot-dominant blend, as is the second wine, Petit Bécot (formerly Tournelle de Beau-Séjour Bécot).

The estate dates back to the Middle Ages, when the property had vineyards cultivated by monks of the Saint Martin Abbey. Eventually, it came under the ownership of General Jacques de Carle, a member of the prominent Figeac family, who renamed the estate to Beauséjour in 1787.

In 1869, the property was divided between the two children of Pierre-Paulin Ducarpe. Ducarpe’s son inherited one half of the vineyards and kept the name Beauséjour. In 1924, Doctor Jean Fagouet took ownership of the son’s estate and renamed it to Beauséjour-Dr-Fagouet.

The estate gained its modern name in 1969, after it was bought by Michel Bécot. From 1985 to 1996, Château Beau-Séjour-Bécot was demoted from Grand Cru Classé B status to the broader Grand Cru Classé designation. Michel Bécot had incorporated two other vineyards into the estate without the approval of the INAO and against the Saint-Émilion classification rules. High-profile consultant winemaker Michel Rolland was taken on to remedy this downgrading. The estate regained the more prestigious status in 1996 after the next classification review, based on the quality of its wine.

Since 2014 the estate has been run by Juliette Bécot, the grand-daughter of Michel, and husband Julien Barthe. Thomas Duclos replaced Rolland as consultant in 2018.

The 22 hectares (54 acres) of vineyards have an average vine age of around 45 years. Some Merlot vines are more than 70 years old. Merlot accounts for around 80 percent of plantings, with around 15 percent Cabernet Franc and a small amount of Cabernet Sauvignon. Total annual production is around 80,000 bottles.

In the winery, 20 to 40 percent of the fruit is whole-cluster fermented. Fermentation takes place in stainless steel tanks, after around four days of cold maceration. Most of the wine undergoes malolactic fermentation in barrel, spending around four months on its lees. For the grand vin, most of the wine is matured in French oak barrels for 16 to 20 months before bottling. A small component is aged in clay amphorae.

The Bécot family also made a wine called Château La Gomerie, a “garage wine” made with 100-percent Merlot from an adjacent 2.5-hectare (6-acre) vineyard. It was made in very limited quantities (roughly 1000 cases annually) and made its debut with the 1995 vintage – the year the plot was acquired. In 2011 a fire at La Gomerie destroyed much of the château and cellars, and the plot was integrated for a few years into the vineyard of Beau-Séjour-Bécot. La Gomerie was re-introduced several years later, although production remains limited.

Another property, Château Joanin Bécot, forms part of the wider Becot family portfolio. Located in Castillon Côtes de Bordeaux, the estate comprises 12 hectares (30 acres) of vines and sits on a clay-limestone plateau just west of Saint-Philippe-d’Aiguille (a small town 12km/7 miles due east of Saint-Émilion). Instant Bécot is an AOC Bordeaux wine made from vines outside of Saint-Émilion.

Find out more about this wine, its price and where to buy it by following this link to the Wine-Searcher website: https://www.wine-searcher.com/find/instant+becot+bordeaux+france/2018

#winesearcher #winetasting #instantbecot #becot #bordeaux #clarets #redbordeaux #winelovers #frenchwine #redwine #bordeauxwine #masterofwine

hello there today I’m trying a wine that I found in a wine shop recently that Drew my attention instantly because it was very well priced and uh it carries the beo name so this is a label that’s very akin to the property that the beo family own which is the Premier gr crew classy B Bosa beo from santon this is the 2018 vintage of instant beo so not the gr van of the santon gronw class in fact simply a wine classified as AC bordo but produced by the same family I was interested to see what the wine was like and I’ve tried to research it but I haven’t actually found an awful lot of information about this wine in particular we know that it’s a blend that’s predominantly Merlo we know that the fruit comes off old vines that have grown on a calcerous clay Plateau We Know The Vineyards are outside santon from the label I can see that the blend is in fact 85% Merlo 14% Cabernet fron with 1% of malbeck in there the label also says that this is a wine that’s made to be approachable and to be drunk young and I I guess the fact that it’s called instant beo really is all we should need to know about that so what else do we know we know that it’s made by the beo family so a little bit of background there the beo family evidently have lived in Santa milon since the 1790s but their their current ownership of an estate Boco dates back to the purchase of a shadow called chatow laart in 1929 there a 4.45 hectare estate on the coat in santon on the Limestone coat and a historic site for growing vines I mean the the the Romans are recorded as having having grown vines on the slopes now the story really starts after the second world war when somebody called Michelle Becka inherits this this small property now Michelle is a car parts dealer working in Bordeaux and in those days the income from a 4.45 hectare property in Santo would not have been sufficient to have kept his family however he was quite an eager weekend viticulturist and and applied himself with some Vigor to the estate but then in 1969 an opportunity came up to buy nine hectares of the neighboring property which is known at that stage as bosur fagu Bose Dr fagu which was a portion of a larger estate that had been split off decades earlier and Michelle be’s approach was to to take the two properties and combine them as one and he named this property boser becko 10 years later in 1979 another opportunity came up to buy a contiguous Vineyard that of Tu Mulan which was a neighboring 4 and A2 hectare Vineyard Michelle purchased this and again combined the property actually feeling that it improved the overall quality of the wines being made and for 6 years he continued to sell this under the under the Estates designation as a santon premier gron crew class a level B but then in 1985 the announcement of the reclassification of Santo dealt Michelle the bitter blow of really quite unexpected downgrading by the inao The Institute national appion origin of his estate to gron crew class status their argument being that he hadn’t actually applied for permission to combine the the Estates I mean he’d been allowed to carry on selling the wine for 6 years as I said I think for for Michelle it was quite unexpected and he took it very personally retiring that year handing over the the management of the property to his sons Gerard and Dominique now Gerard and Dominique really sort of rose to the challenge of of the the downgrading of the estate and and rapidly instituted many new practices on the estate they engaged the consultant enologist Michelle Roland to help them make the wines they started green harvesting they started picking into Cadets into shallow baskets they introduced sorting tables at the winery they rebuilt the their their Sellers and so with these many approaches to improving quality when the 10-year reclassification of santon came around again in 1996 bco was returned returned to its status as a santon premier Grand crew Class A Class B in 2001 the family bought a second property in what was then the coat de castillon and is now known as castillon coat de bordeau ear they bought a Vineyard it was a Ludy called janin which was reconed shatow xan beo and over the years they’ve acquired other plots of vines to increase the estate size to 15 hectares the estate situation in castillon cot de Bordeaux is about 12 km to the east of Santo and here again we see a limestone Plateau with clay soils from an early stage Juliet beo Gerard’s daughter was put in charge of running shatow Xin beo and she and her husband Julian B eventually took over running chatow Bosco along with the rest of the family’s Estates in 2014 as far as I can see the first vintage of instant beo was also produced in 2014 given the fact that this is a wine from calcarius clay soils it does leave me wondering whether this is actually a wine that is predominantly from that estate but I have no information to confirm that whatsoever it just seems logical as for the wine making again I have no details we are told however that the wine makers from Bosco oversee the wine making for this wine so it would be fair to assume then that that approaches such as green harvesting handpicking into cajetes and sorting at the winery are all applied to this wine we know this is a wine for drinking young we’ve already seen the blend is quite heavily merow at 85% which should make it more accessible sort of less structured than a wine with more cabinet FR cabet s or malbeck in it one would assume the wine would undergo a shorter mation to give less astringent tannins and would spend less if any time in Oak certainly less New Hope and probably not be aged anywhere near as long before release as I say though all of these are assumptions so let’s have a taste of the wine and see how it Stacks up shall we I’m actually quite impressed by what a deep color we have here I mean 2018 is a Rel relatively powerful vintage but that’s uh virtually opaque I can only just make out the stem of the glass through through the wine there there’s a a a deep relatively dark reddish color with a a slight Mish hint at The Rim it’s not losing any color to the to the rim particularly as I swirl it it’s almost staining the glass there’s a a 14% alcohol here and and the the wine is hanging and only quite slowly forming tears on the glass there it is quite viscous so let’s see what we making the aroma shall we the Aromas have some lovely lifted perfumes not surprisingly for a wine that’s predominantly Merlo there are plumy notes but there’s also a sort of a lifted red currant andh perhaps a hint of ciss in there there is a lovely fresh High toned perfume to the wine that’s very attractive there are no obvious Oak notes on the on the Aromas though I would say so let’s have a taste on the pan on the front of the mouth that’s good and fresh there’s a smoothness to the texture and a richness it really is actually beautifully smooth and yet there’s a a a richness and a core to the wine that you know there’s a concentration they were talking about this being the product of old Vines and I can certainly see good concentrated fruit in there there’s almost a licoricey core there surrounded by lovely Rich red fruit there’s sort of cranberries there’s red currants it’s Lively red fruit I’m not particularly seeing new Oak notes there there isn’t no sort of a cedar or a cinnamon note there is however a graininess to the structure sort of across the middle of the palette that makes me think the wine probably has seen a little bit of Oak and possibly a little bit of new Oak the alcohol at 14% is is clearly adding roundness and richness to the the palette there it’s not particularly adding hotness because there is this Rich juicy fruit that almost sort of has a a sort of a a red cherry ripeness but then there’s not quite the brightness of red cherries you’ve almost got a core of sort of Black Plum dams and bullish that sort of Darker fruit sort of making up the mid pallet the wine is Rich and really quite sort of licorish and Black Plum at the Finish however although the Finish has a fair amount of weight and structure there is a lovely freshness that gives us sort of a clean note to the finish and just allows a little bit of that that sort of red fruit perfume that I was talking about on the Aromas just to stand out from the Finish there I do think this is a wine that’s very approachable now I think it’s probably a wine that you could keep for four or 5 years if you wanted to but I don’t really see any need for it it is approachable now it has a lovely freshness and it shows a little of the freshness and perfumed balance that I would expect from Bosco itself so from that point of view it actually does seem to reflect the the wines being made at the family’s leading property I’m actually very impressed by this wine I was looking at the aggregated critic score that we have for instant beo on wine Searcher and that’s at just 87 points there which I think is a reasonable score but I actually think that just at the moment wine is perhaps exceeding that and is certainly providing a wonderful drinkability for its price I’ve been very impressed by this I think if you enjoy the wines of santal I think you might be very interested by this I think it’s quite a classy wine that offers lovely value for money so thank you so much for watching I do hope you found the video of interest if you have enjoyed it do please press the like button if you’d like to watch more the best answer would be to sign up and subscribe to our YouTube channel that way you can set yourself a reminder and get an alert every time we publish a new video if you have any friends you think might like to watch the video do please feel free to pass it on we’d really love your support in that way if you have any comments you’d like to make please leave those in the comments box below we’d be really interested to hear what you think actually about the tastings we’re doing the wines we’re looking at or anything else that relates to that I’ll leave a link to this vintage of this wine on the wine Searcher website so that you can follow that and you can find out where the Wine’s available what its pricing is and any other details we have about the wine so thank you again for joining us and I do hope you’ll manage to make some time and come and join us for another tasting in the very near future thanks again bye for now