Bordeaux 2011 at Two Years: Pomerol
The commune of Pomerol has never been well represented at the annual Union des Grands Crus tasting. In recent years the Pomerol contingent has expanded, albeit slightly. A few years ago there were never more than half a dozen attendees, and I usually tagged my notes onto the end of my St Emilion review. Now, with the likes of Château le Bon Pasteur and Château La Croix de Gay having joined the fray they almost hit double numbers. Add in the fact that I spent the best part of a day in the commune visiting Château Le Gay, Château Lafleur, Clos du Clocher and Château L’Église Clinet and we have a fairly broad collection of notes here. I also visited Petrus, and met up with Olivier Berrouet and we were joined for a short while by his father Jean-Claude Berrouet, who was winemaker at Petrus from 1963 through to 1977. Olivier elected to pour the 2012 instead of the 2011, which was obviously deemed unsuitable for tasting at the moment, and so that’s the last mention I will make of Petrus in this 2011 report.
As was the case with St Emilion, Pomerol has had a rather different vintage to the left bank communes. Here again we have the Merlot advantage, and as a general rule the wines are of a quality higher than on the left bank. Having said that, as with St Emilion, there are no truly ‘great’ wines here, although clearly there are one or two that are of a very high level of quality indeed. This was not a vintage where Cabernet Sauvignon flopped and Merlot romped home, turning in a perfect, blemish-free performance. The vintage was unkind to both varieties, it is just that Merlot came off slightly better. As an additional complexity, here on the right bank some winemakers clearly thought their Cabernet Franc quality to be good, and preferable to that of the Merlot. As a consequence Cabernet Franc plays a significant role in the character of some wines.
