2016 Chateau Siran Saint-Jacques de Siran Bordeaux Superieur 750 ml

Château Siran sits a mere six minutes from First Growth powerhouse Château Margaux ($750), a darling of the 1855 Bordeaux Classification whose wines are regulars on end-of-year Top Ten lists. Château Siran narrowly missed inclusion in the 1855 Classification, but you wouldn’t know it from tasting their gorgeously fragrant wines. 

Luckily for us (and our members), the vines behind Siran’s Merlot-dominant Saint-Jacques bottling fall just outside the Margaux appellation, which means we get Margaux-level quality and elegance at an unreal sub-$20 price.

We first stumbled upon the strikingly perfumed, seductively velvety 2016 Château Siran Saint-Jacques at a rustic bistro while hungrily awaiting its signature dish of roasted duck.

There was no shortage of good wine in those parts, so we told the waiter to bring us glasses of a reasonably priced red popular with the locals. 

We took one sip of what arrived from the bar and we immediately waved down our bewildered waiter for directions to the château. We simply couldn’t reconcile the wine’s price with what leaped out of the glass. The ruby-hued Saint-Jacques’s lifted, generous nose of dark fruit, herb, leather, and tobacco almost made us forget our rumbling stomachs. Finding out the estate was practically next door to the restaurant, we gobbled down our lunch and hit the road.

We arrived to an estate in the throes of getting to that next level of greatness. Quality at Château Siran has surged since Édouard Miailhe took over the estate from his parents in 2007. An art and vintage car collector, Édouard oversaw a complete renovation and modernization of Siran’s cellars. Realizing he possessed some top terroir for Merlot, most notably his clay- and sandy gravel-based Saint-Jacques parcels, he hired Merlot mastermind and 100-point winemaker Hubert de Boüard of the legendary Château Angélus as a consultant in 2015. 

It’s tough to overstate how deliciously the stars aligned for the 2016 Château Siran Saint-Jacques: a state-of-the-art cellar, a top Merlot expert on the production team and an outstanding vintage Roger Voss of Wine Enthusiast praises because of its “quality across the Bordeaux hierarchy.”

A star we can’t forget is the Siran team. If anyone was hungry that day, it was them. For an estate with an almost 600-year history, it was as if they were trying to make up for lost time and prove that they belonged among Margaux’s elite. If their superb 2016 Saint-Jacques is any indication, they have already succeeded. The wine is a value any lover of classic Bordeaux would be crazy to walk away from.