Sauternes

Château de Fargues is the Lur-Saluces family's own seat, at Fargues-de-Langon a few kilometres south-east of Sauternes proper, held since 1472 - older than the family's connection to Yquem, which arrived in 1785 by marriage. It sits outside the 1855 classification entirely, which here says more about which properties happened to be ranked than about the wine.

The 1998 came off 14 hectares and ran to twenty thousand bottles. Fermentation was in barrel on indigenous yeasts over three to five weeks, the wine then raised entirely in one- and two-year-old barriques for thirty months. Picking was drawn out across four tries: the first began on 22 September and took two-thirds of the crop in eight days over two passes, working the gravelly parcels and leaving the old vines; heavy rain in early October stopped everything, sun and persistent morning fog from the 17th restarted botrytis on the later parcels, and the fourth and final trie closed the harvest on 28 October. The estate reads the year as a vintage in two acts - September giving finesse and tension, October breadth and richness.

Alexandre de Lur Saluces was running Château d'Yquem at the same time, and one specialist account holds that in this era the two wines were made by the same method and the same severe selection. That overlap ended in the following decade: LVMH took majority control of Yquem in 1999 and he left in 2004, after which Fargues had his full attention.

A half bottle, 375 ml at 13.5%.