2017 Chateau Pontet Canet

It was 6pm on Friday 13^th. We drove up the winding drive to Chateau Pontet Canet, our last stop for the day and indeed our last stop of the intense and scary tooth-blackening week that is ‘EN PRIMEUR WEEK’ (cue dramatic horror film music). Jean-Michel Comme, technical director at Pontet Canet, greeted us at the doors of the winery offering a gentle smile that barely masked the fear that he might not make it another minute after what he reckoned had been 2,000 or so pink-trousered ponces prancing around his newly acquired amphorae all week.

Without going into the details, here are the highlights of 2017 in Bordeaux:

-       Frost hit hard.

-       Not everyone was hit though. Basically the Chateaux who could afford to miss a vintage went unscathed, those that couldn’t, got severely damaged.

-       The wineries that didn’t get hit or at least not too badly, made some very decent wines especially considering the outstanding vintage that was 2016 had just set the bar very high.

-       Pauillac was, fairly unsurprisingly, one of the best appellations.

I’ve decided to write about Chateau Pontet Canet because it was an excellent wine but more because I think that their approach to winemaking is particularly interesting and refreshing in a region like Bordeaux where tradition is curtailed only by money and price tags put winemakers in a position of fear of experimentation. With only a handful of wineries working biodynamically, Bordeaux is still a little way behind the rest of the world. Having spoken to a few producers around the region, the underlying common theme seemed to be that the need to deliver extremely high quality wine to a very expectant market place means winemakers need the option to spray/treat the vines at a moments notice if anything were to happen. A few notable wineries are however edging towards biodynamic farming and beginning to sing its praises such as Latour, Palmer and Pavie Macquin. Even Margaux is quietly experimenting. Pontet Canet, however, is the Bordeaux property that is synonymous with biodynamic farming. The Tesseron family did it their way and gained monumental recognition for a surprising quality boost since the beginning of their conversion back in 2004.

Jean-Michel Comme marched us through the vat room explaining this was the first vintage to use his new toys: 32 40hl Dolium, 2^nd century Roman amphorae built to the golden ratio out of gravel dug up from around the estate. These were used for 35% of the fermentation, with 50% done in new oak and the rest in one-year-old oak. Alfred Tesseron, owner, has made the decision to stop using electricity completely in the vat room in the next few years. This year he started by illiminating the pumping over process, replacing it with good old fashioned punching down by hand.

The Dolium

The harvest was very relaxed for 2017. Starting on the 18^th of September, they gently worked their way around the ripeness levels of each plot of Merlot over about a week even taking a few brakes in the middle to allow the grapes to reach their full potential. Ten days later they started on the Cabernet Sauvignon with the same approach. The final blend of 2017 is 64% Cabernet Sauvignon, 31% Merlot, 4% Cabernet Franc and 1% Petit Verdot.

We worked our way through the unassuming winery up to the tasting room where Jean-Michel poured us our long awaited samples of 2017 Pontet Canet. Pontet Canet is a powerhouse in the worst of years. 2017 is a very decent year, and Pontet Canet has delivered. This is a deep wine with class, poise and elegance. It holds forth, leaps out of the glass and charms. It shows wonderful notes of sour cherry, violets and liquorice as well as some light hints of graphite. But the binding element that holds this wine together and puts it above a lot of its peers is the energy. The feeling you get from drinking it, and the satisfaction it lulls you into. Pontet Canet may not be the very best wine of the vintage but it is definitely one of the most unique and by far the most interesting.