1998 Château Lafleur

Located in the shadow of the famous Château Petrus estate, tiny Château Lafleur with its 11 acres of Pomerol vineyards was for much of its history known only to the most knowledgeable Bordeaux connoisseurs. Like most wine estates in France it was a family business for several centuries, and in the 1940s it was inherited by two sisters, Therese and Marie Robin, who never married or had children. The sisters quietly ran the estate until their deaths, often making outstanding wine. Since 1985 the estate has been run by Sylvie and Jacques Guinaudeau, niece and nephew to the Robin sisters. The pair has modernized winemaking using new oak casks for some vintages. Most critics agree that one key to the quality of the wine is the vineyard’s terroir, which benefits from deposits of phosphorus and potassium. Vineyards are planted to 50% Cabernet France and 50% Merlot, and the average vine is 30 years old. About 12,000 bottles of Château Lafleur are produced annually.

Pomerol is the smallest of Bordeaux’s red wine producing regions, with only about 2,000 acres of vineyards. Located on the east side of the Dordogne River, it is one of the so-called “right bank” appellations and therefore planted primarily to Merlot. Pomerol is unique in Bordeaux in that it is the only district never to have been rated in a classification system. Some historians think Pomerol’s location on the right bank made it unattractive to Bordeaux-based wine traders, who had plenty of wine from Medoc and Graves to export to England and northern Europe. Since ranking estates was essentially a marketing ploy to help brokers sell wine, ranking an area where they did little business held no interest for them. Pomerol didn’t get much attention from the international wine community until the 1960s, when Jean-Pierre Moueix, an entrepreneurial wine merchant, started buying some of Pomerol’s best estates and exporting the wines. Today the influential Moueix family owns Pomerol’s most famous estate, Château Pétrus, along with numerous other Pomerol estates. Pomerol wines, primarily Merlot blended with small amounts of Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon, are considered softer and less tannic than left bank Bordeaux.