Château Valandraud, 2025
Château Valandraud, 2025
- 75cl
- 13.8%
- Red Still
- Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon
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Est. delivery in 2028
Jean-Luc Thunevin's Château Valandraud remains one of Bordeaux's most polarising success stories. From a tiny Saint-Émilion vineyard that didn't exist on wine maps in the 1990s, Thunevin crafted something entirely new: a Right Bank wine with Left Bank intensity, made with obsessive attention to every grape. The approach is uncompromising - hand-harvesting, berry selection, extended macerations, and new French oak that would make a Pauillac producer blush.
What the critics say:
"The 2025 Valandraud is breathtaking. Its the first vintage made by Jean-Luc Thunevin and Marie Lefévère together. It therefore represents a changing of the guard, now that Lefévère and her husband, Christophe, have taken full ownership of the property after many years holding a minority stake. Vibrant and explosive in the glass, the 2025 Valandraud offers an exotic mélange of dark blue/purplish fruit, lavender, spice and mocha. There's gorgeous precision here, much of that coming from more finesse in the tannins. The 2025 is utterly magnificent. Élevage is 90% new oak and 10% 15HL _foudres). Tasted two times."
"A new take on Valandraud this year after Jean-Luc Thunevin sold his majority stake to Christophe et Marie Lefévère (Château Sansonnet, Château Moulin du Cadet, Château Villemaurine. With Grégory Leymarie now managing director he said this is the perfect vintage to tell a new story with a new vision and a reduction in production by 20-25%. Gorgeous heady scents on the nose, ripe blackcurrant, cherries and strawberries. Chalky, velvety, ripe but not overly so, you have that intensity and concentration of fruit – but there’s such finesse. Elegance is here in spades, this is soft and approachable already. A juicy, clean and crystalline core with a soft salty, oyster shell mineral bite. I love this for its calmness, roundness and general softness. You still have the signature fruit aspect – the spiced aromatics and the clean blackcurrant, plum and black cherry fruit – the signature of the estate is still recognisable but with a lot more delicacy. Ageing 100% new oak. 3.48pH, 4g total acidity."
"Deep dark ruby garnet, opaque core, violet reflections, delicate rim brightening. Fine cassis, black cherry fruit, a hint of roasted aromas, attractive bouquet. Complex, juicy, dark berry fruit, good freshness, ripe, supporting tannins, salty touch, red berry nuances in the aftertaste, animating style, good ageing potential."
The Valandraud vineyards span several small parcels across Saint-Émilion's varied geology, from limestone plateaux to sandy-clay slopes near the town. This patchwork approach allows Thunevin to blend different soil expressions, creating complexity through diversity rather than single-site purity. The fragmented vineyard structure, once seen as a disadvantage, became central to the wine's identity as each parcel contributes distinct characteristics to the final blend.
Saint-Émilion operates a different classification system from the Médoc, with estates able to apply for promotion every ten years, creating both opportunity and controversy. The appellation favours Merlot over Cabernet Sauvignon due to its clay-limestone soils, producing wines that are generally more approachable young than their Left Bank counterparts. Valandraud's success outside the traditional classification system helped democratise Saint-Émilion, proving that great wine doesn't require centuries of history. The appellation now embraces both ancient châteaux and garage wine upstarts, making it Bordeaux's most dynamic region.
The 2025 Bordeaux vintage emerged from one of the most demanding growing seasons in recent memory — the earliest budbreak since 1989, June temperatures second only to 2003 since records began, and an unusually early harvest beginning in August for the whites. Conditions that should have produced heavy, overripe wines. They didn't. Decanter's Georgie Hindle, who tasted close to 200 wines ahead of the formal campaign, describes "exceptional concentration, aromatic purity and a freshness that contradicts the record-breaking heat.
The early critical consensus places 2025 stylistically between the precision of 2020 and the structure of 2016, with the brightness of 2023 — a combination that suggests a very serious vintage indeed. Yields are dramatically low, the smallest crop since 1991, with production across the Gironde running around 15% below the five-year average. The quality is here. There simply isn't very much of it.
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Chateau Valandraud
