Bordeaux 2008 at Ten Years: Pauillac
While St Estèphe has played host to a massive game of musical chairs over the last decades, this is not so true of Pauillac, although there have certainly been changes here. The most recent is the sale of Château Haut-Batailley, just a year or two ago. For so long in the hands of the Borie family, when Françoise de Brest-Borie decided to sell, in order to secure her children’s inheritance, her nephew François-Xavier Borie simply could not raise the funds to buy it. As a consequence it was offered for sale more widely, and was snapped up by the Cazes family of Château Lynch-Bages.
A few faces have changed elsewhere, but on the whole things have been a little more sedate here. The 2008s at the Mouton estates, Château Mouton-Rothschild, Château d’Armailhac and Château Clerc-Milon were the work of the talented Philippe Dhalluin, who arrived here in 2004, and of course Château Latour was under the direction of Frédéric Engerer, an old hand here, having arrived with curriculum vitae in hand in 1995. The most noteworthy difference among the first growths in 2008 compared to today was at Château Lafite-Rothschild, which at this time was fronted by the effervescent Charles Chevallier, now semi-retired of course. In recent years the baton has been passed to a new technical director, Eric Kohler, while Bruno Prats has also arrived to take on a managerial role.
