Château La Connivence

Walking the rows before the blend

Alexandre de Malet Roquefort tastes grapes in the rows before he carries the day back to the cellar as winemaker at Château La Connivence, Pomerol, Saint-Émilion, France. His own description of the work stays close to that gesture: “wine of my ancestors and tasting the grapes while walking in the vineyards.” At La Connivence, that sentence is less a motto than a method, because the property leaves little room for distance between owner, fruit, and bottle.

Alexandre de Malet Roquefort has been co-owner and director of Château La Connivence since 2001, while also heading Domaines Comte de Malet Roquefort in Saint-Émilion. The role places vineyard judgment inside family stewardship, not beside it. His work here belongs to a Bordeaux lineage in which the family name, the estate name, and the taste of fruit at harvest all meet before the blend is fixed. La Connivence is not a broad estate program with many cuvées to explain. It is a small Pomerol holding, focused on one principal wine and on the discipline required when the vineyard itself sets the scale.

One hectare, one main wine

The estate centers on a one-hectare gravel-and-clay vineyard in the Pomerol AOC, planted to Merlot and Cabernet Franc. The house style is still red Bordeaux, Merlot-dominant by structure and Right Bank by instinct, with Cabernet Franc carrying lift and frame. Published technical notes give the planting as 65% Merlot and 35% Cabernet Franc, a useful measure of the wine’s grammar before barrel or vintage begins to speak.

La Connivence works at a scale where selection is not an abstraction. The vineyard’s thick gravel, fine gravel, and clay-rich ground hold the terms of the wine: drainage, reserve, and the slow ripening judgment that Alexandre makes by walking and tasting. The estate produces a single limited-production Château La Connivence wine; La Belle Connivence is associated with the same domain as a second wine from younger vines. For the flagship, the Bordeaux method remains legible: fruit from the estate, fermentation for a still red wine, then barrel aging for approximately 16 months before the bottle carries the place outward.

A quiet cellar for a scarce Pomerol

The room at La Connivence asks for a different kind of attention than a large château floor. The property is intimate, cellar-driven, and quiet, with the work concentrated around a small parcel rather than dispersed across a wide range of holdings. In a place of this size, the vineyard is never background. The cellar receives what the rows give it, and the tasting room, when opened for private tasting, belongs to the same restrained rhythm.

The atmosphere follows the wine’s narrow brief. Gravel and clay are not decorative language here; they are the bench. Merlot and Cabernet Franc are not a portfolio, they are the available hands. Alexandre’s long tenure gives the place its continuity, and the taste of fruit in Pomerol is followed by the Château La Connivence bottle.