Le Vin des Rois
One fine February morning in 1872, the three-mast barque Marie-Thérèse was sailing towards Saigon with 2 000 bottles of Gruaud Larose 1865, which some of them were for Khai Dinh, Emperor of Viêt-nam. She was heading directly north through the Gaspar Straits, between Borneo and Singapore, which are the only way to get to the Sea of China. Suddenly, off the pirate-infested coast where hundreds of boats have gone down in storms, the Marie-Thérèse hit a shoal and sank under ten fathoms of water, amongst the sand and the coral. In 1992, one hundred and twenty years after the disaster, the wreck was discovered and the wine aromas captivated spellbound wine experts. Without this adventure, those wines would have reached the prestigious table of the kings like most of the wines Gruaud Larose was producing at this time. “The best wines of France are drunk in Russia”. This tribute to Gruaud Larose wines which Théophile Gauthier makes in “Voyages en Russie” in the 19th century clearly is another example that shows how the estate wines were particularly appreciated by major kingdoms in Europe and in Asia.
