It is many a year since we tasted a petit château Bordeaux worth its classic $10 or $11 retail price-tag, so our hearts leapt when we encountered this old-fashioned beauty seemingly caught in a commercial time-warp. Wilfrid Franc de Ferrière, despite his aristocratic-sounding French name, speaks an unaffected English with a disconcerting New Zealand twang to it (he’s married to a Kiwi). Ste. Foy is in the extreme south-eastern part of Bordeaux. In 2018, son Pierre began his assumption of control and has already made several innovations in a progressive direction. Herbicides have been replaced by mechanical weeding and insecticides eliminated in favour of pheromonal confusion. We can look forward to new cuvées in the “natural” direction.