Bordeaux 2009 at Four Years: Pomerol
It is so often said – especially when looking back over recent vintages including 2006, 2008, 2011 and certainly 2012 – that Pomerol outclasses St Emilion. Partly this is, perhaps, down to the terroir; the banks of Günzian and Mindelian gravel and clay to be found in Pomerol providing something that the limestone and clay of St Emilion simply cannot. And partly it is, I am sure, down to the individuals; there seems to be less of a temptation to over-extract, to try and make more of your wine than it really is. Here in Pomerol some of the region’s foremost winemakers – Denis Durantou, Jean-Michel Laporte, Alexandre Thienpont and Olivier Berrouet, to name just four – make wines that reflect the soils, and the vintage, and not the aggressive extraction that characterises many of the wines made ten minutes down the road, in this appellation’s most significant neighbour.
Certainly this would appear to be the case in the 2009 vintage. Nevertheless here, as in St Emilion, some wines certainly do show the rather sweet, lightly-baked, confit-character or slightly over-ripe fruit, which means that the range of scores here is just as broad as it is in St Emilion. Importantly, though, in general this confit character is not matched by a prodigious extraction of tannins, so I suspect in Pomerol the character of the wines is a truer reflection of the vintage (in fruit ripeness) than it is the winemaking (the extraction in particular); this probably makes me more inclined to want to drink the wines. It is perhaps this finer balance, the freshness and vigour shown by some wines unencumbered by walls of mouth-puckering tannin, that has result in a slightly higher peak here than in St Emilion, as there are a couple of very high-scoring wines here, hitting 18.5 and 19 out of 20, something I didn’t find in my review of St Emilion.
