There is a tram out of central Bordeaux that runs west towards the airport. Get off at the right stop and you are standing beside a vineyard with a bus shelter on one side and an apartment block on the other. Cars go past at head height to the vines. This is not a curiosity or a planning failure. It is what is left of the district that made Bordeaux's name three hundred years before anyone planted the Medoc.
The city ate the vineyard
Graves is the oldest wine country in Bordeaux, and its problem is its address. It begins where the city ends, which in the 1700s was a comfortable distance and by the 1960s was not a distance at all. As Bordeaux grew, the vineyards nearest the centre were worth more as building land than as vines, and they went. Whole communes that appear in eighteenth-century records as wine parishes are now bus routes.
What survived, survived for one reason: it was already famous enough that the wine was worth more than the concrete. That is a brutal filter, and it explains why the Graves properties you can still buy are disproportionately the ones with long histories. There was no middle ground. You were either famous or you were flats.
Three things follow that matter in the glass. The first is heat. A vineyard enclosed by buildings, roads and car parks sits in a warmer microclimate than open country: masonry and tarmac absorb sun during the day and release it at night, and the difference is enough to move harvest forward. These vineyards are routinely among the first picked in Bordeaux, sometimes by two weeks.
The second is that they cannot grow. The parcels are fenced in by streets. Production is capped at whatever the walls contain, which means a property here cannot respond to demand by planting more, only by charging more.
The third is legal. In 1987 the northern part of Graves was carved out as its own appellation, Pessac-Leognan, largely so that the surviving estates had a name worth defending in a planning dispute. Unlike every Medoc appellation, it covers white wine as well as red, and that single clause is why serious dry white exists here and does not exist in Pauillac.
Pape Clement
The vineyard beside the tram stop is Pape Clement, and it has been planted since the early 1300s, which makes it the oldest continuously worked vineyard in Bordeaux. It got its name when its owner, Bertrand de Goth, was elected Pope Clement V and handed the property to the archbishopric. It has been inside the Pessac suburbs for about a century.
It is classified for red under the Graves classification, a separate and much later exercise than the 1855 list, and one that graded red and white independently. The estate has been in the hands of Bernard Magrez since the mid-1980s, which is worth knowing because his name appears on labels attached to this property as well as the chateau's own.
The wines are a good illustration of the heat point. Pape Clement's reds are riper, rounder and more openly perfumed than a Medoc wine of the same price and age, with a smoky, mineral edge that people attribute to the gravel and that certainly does not come from the oak. They are drinkable earlier than their structure suggests. The white, made in very small volume, is the more unusual wine of the two: there is a lot of competition for a good red at this price and almost none for a good white.
What we have
Our Pape Clement range is unusually complete, and it climbs in two separate columns rather than one.
The red column starts with Le Clementin, the second wine, which runs from around HK$200 for the 2007 up to about HK$380. The 2014 Clementin at around HK$290 is the sensible middle of that stretch. There is also a 2019 bottling under the Bernard Magrez label at around HK$340, the same idea wearing a different jacket. Above that sits the grand vin, from around HK$580 for the 2014 to around HK$680 for the 2018 and its neighbours, with older bottles beyond.
The white column is much shorter and much more interesting. Le Clementin Blanc 2019 is around HK$360 and the 2016 around HK$400. The grand vin white exists here only in a six-litre bottle at a price that is a different conversation entirely.
What we would pick, and why
Le Clementin Blanc 2016, around HK$400. This is the pick, and it is not the most expensive thing on the page by a factor of five. Barrel-fermented Sauvignon Blanc with Semillon, ten years old, which is where these whites stop tasting of citrus and start tasting of wax, toast and dried lemon peel. It is one of a very small number of dry whites at this price that can handle a heavy dish, and in Hong Kong that is a real advantage: steamed fish with ginger and spring onion, or roast goose, will destroy a lean young white and will not touch this.
Pape Clement 2014, around HK$580. The cheapest grand vin here and the best-proportioned. 2014 in Bordeaux was a cool summer saved by a very warm September, which suits a warm site perfectly: it kept the acid that a hot vineyard tends to lose. Decant it, drink it over the next eight years.
Le Clementin rouge 2014, around HK$290. If you want to understand the property before spending on it, buy this and the grand vin from the same year and open them side by side. Same vineyard, same cellar, same weather, different selection. You will learn more in one evening than from a year of reading, and one of the two bottles costs half of what a decent restaurant would charge for a glass.
Where paying more stops buying flavour
The step from Clementin to the grand vin is a real step: more concentration, more structure, more time in bottle ahead of it. Roughly HK$290 to roughly HK$580 buys a different wine.
The steps inside the grand vin mostly do not. Between the 2014 at around HK$580 and the 2018 at around HK$680 there is a hundred dollars, and what it buys is a more recent vintage with a higher score attached and further to travel before it is ready. If you are drinking it this year, the older bottle is the better purchase and the cheaper one. The 2003 at over HK$1,300 is priced on age and rarity, not on being a better bottle of wine, and anyone buying it should want the year specifically.
Who should skip this property entirely: anyone who wants a Bordeaux that tastes classically austere. The heat of the site makes these wines rounder and more obviously flattering than a Medoc equivalent, and there are drinkers who read that as a lack of seriousness. If that is you, this page will not change your mind and it is not trying to.