Bordeaux 2011 Primeurs: Pontet-Canet & The Firsts
If you were to make a sandwich with Pontet-Canet as the filling, which château should go around it? We would no doubt all make slightly different choices, although I am sure the Tesserons would be very happy with the order of play on my main day of tasting in Pauillac, which went Lafite, Pontet-Canet and then Mouton. Who would have thought this would be the way Pontet-Canet would be viewed by so many when Alfred began his work here, about two decades ago now?
Pontet-Canet
I will deal with Pontet-Canet before the firsts, primarily because there are some particularly curious facets to the wine worthy of discussion, secondly because although the prices have rocketed in recent years, there is still some hope that us mere mortals may be able to afford a bottle or two. I lost any such aspiration regarding the first growths after the 2002 vintage.
I don’t really need to recount the story of Pontet-Canet here, but will throw in one or two details to provide some context for the latest developments. Rescued from the doldrums, Alfred Tesseron has made his mark on Pontet-Canet not only by pushing quality to stratospheric heights, but also with the methodologies by which he has achieved that. We have here biodynamics, cement Nomblot eggs and horses in the vineyard; the latest news on the latter is that the area of vineyard worked solely by horses is now up to 32 hectares, not quite halfway, but getting close. Looking specifically at the 2011 vintage, Pontet-Canet seems to have bucked the trend of aggressive selection this year, because in a vintage when the grand vin is often just 20-40% of the harvest, the Tesserons seem to have bottled just about everything as their first wine. Alfred Tesseron was somewhat cagey about this, and when I asked him what proportion of the harvest had gone into Pontet-Canet, and what had gone into the rarely-sighted (because there isn’t much of it, I guess!) second wine Les Hauts de Pontet, his responses were persistently obscure, and seemed more like the riddles you might receive from a mathematics teacher than a Bordeaux proprietor welcoming the press and the trade to his château to taste the latest vintage.
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