Château Palmer

The Free Bacchus Story

In 2018 mildew took two thirds of the crop at Château Palmer. That was also the year the estate was certified organic and biodynamic, and the two facts belong together. Palmer is a Margaux third growth, ranked in the Bordeaux classification of 1855 and never seriously re-ranked since — the kind of address with the least reason on earth to gamble a harvest.

Thomas Duroux was given the running of Palmer in 2004 and spent the next decade moving it off chemistry. The first biodynamic trial covered a single hectare in 2009. By the estate’s own account, 2013 was the last year its vines were sprayed with antifungals; from 2014 the whole estate was farmed biodynamically, and the organic and Demeter certificates followed in 2018.

Mildew needs rain, and in 2018 the rain ran from December to July. It is also the disease a biodynamic grower has fewest answers to, and that year the weather won. Palmer took its certificates anyway, in the year it had least to gain from doing so.

What replaced the sprays is a farm rather than a monoculture. About thirty cows of the old Bordelaise breed make the compost, with sheep, goats and pigs alongside them. Fava beans are rolled flat along the rows as mulch, and more than half a mile of hedgerows has been planted among the vines.