Le Dôme | FINE+RARE

About the producer

The man behind highly regarded Saint-Émilion wine Le Dôme is a Nigerian-born Brit who sold his engineering firm in 1992 to move to Cahors and restore a pile of ruins. After meeting a local vineyard owner at a dinner party, he made a few calls and ended up selling his production to Oddbins and was caught by the wine bug.

Within two years Jonathan Maltus had bought Ch. Teyssier and went on to purchase a vineyard bordering Angélus. He became one of the original garagistes of Saint-Émilion - making quantities of wine so small that they could feasibly have been made in your own garage. Le Dôme attracted international acclaim and while the so-called garage movement has since fizzled out, Le Dôme and a couple of other wine labels like La Mondotte and Valandraud have joined the establishment on the other side.

In the vineyard

Le Dôme is a tiny vineyard that has its feet predominantly in sandy soils with iron deposits on a south-facing slope adjacent to Ch. Angélus. The vines were originally planted in 1956 and 1970. While Saint-Émilion is a Merlot-focused appellation, Le Dôme’s wines are 80% Cabernet Franc / 20% Merlot, reflecting the Cabernet Franc-dominant vineyards.

Yields are kept very low (30hl/ha) through strict pruning and green harvesting increasing the concentration of the remaining bunches. It also means that annual production rarely exceeds 1,000 cases.

In the winery

The rigorous selection in the vineyard continues in the winery where fruit is selected berry by berry. The team undertakes a lengthy period of cold maceration before fermentation to extract colour and aromatics, prior to fermentation in wooden vats. The malolactic conversion takes place in French oak barrels, where the wine matures before bottling. Oak use was typically lavish in the first decade of Le Dôme but has since been capped at a maximum of 80% new oak. The resulting wine style is dense, rich and perfumed.

A new winery and tasting room designed by celebrated architect Norman Foster was finally given the go ahead in 2019 after a lengthy approval process, and the cellar will receive its first grapes in 2020.

About the producer