Château Pontet-Canet: Tasting & Drinking
There has, as I hope this profile makes clear, been a huge shift in quality at Château Pontet-Canet, brought about during two decades principally by two men, Alfred Tesseron and Jean-Michel Comme. During the 1990s I feel this shift in quality came without any overt change in style. Looking back to other vintages I have tasted as well as those encountered here, the 1996 tastes very much like a classic left-bank 1996 for instance; the wines have balance and style with moderate substance and texture. I have tasted the 1996 and 1998 several times, as well as the 1999, the year Michel Rolland’s services as consultant were engaged. All these vintages fit, to some extent or another, with this generalisation.
From 2000 onwards, and for most of the first decade of the 21st century, not only has quality continued to rise at Château Pontet-Canet, but the style has evolved in tandem, no doubt heavily influenced by the Tesseron-Comme innovations. The wines began to show more depth, more concentration and more substance. In their youth they seemed burlier and were loaded with more tannin, colour and extract. They still possessed a sense of balance, in that all the components were there, it is just that they were in a very different place to the wines of the mid-1990s. They had a richer, more textured feel too, bolstered by the style of fruit which was less ‘classic’, taking on more of a creamed, confit-like, forest-fruit character. These more modern wines garnered a lot of praise, and the overall feel was more akin to the ultra-confident super-seconds like those mentioned in my introduction than to the Pontet-Canet of old.
More recently, however, perhaps influenced by some lesser vintages – namely 2011 and 2012 – I have noticed something else in the wines of Château Pontet-Canet. They have a remarkable fruit purity now, sometimes damson-like, the sort of aroma I might expect more from a wine such as Le Pin than from this Pauillac estate. And alongside this, there is often a delicate, floral nuance, almost crystalline in character. In part, this seems to reflect the fruit purity that can be seen in other wines made using similar methods to those employed at Château Pontet-Canet, but equally it may reflect the gradual removal of oak from the equation, allowing the fruit to shine through even in the wine’s youth. The end result of this can be seen in vintages such as 2015 when, to my palate at least, the wine matched or perhaps even outclassed its first-growth neighbours.
