Château Pontet-Canet

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1947 vintage label from Château Pontet-Canet

Château Pontet-Canet is a French winery within the Pauillac appellation on the Médoc peninsula near Bordeaux .

Château Pontet-Canet is a classic, good to very good Pauillac . In 1855 the wine was ennobled to the Cinquième Grand Cru and, after a quality crisis since the 1960s, has found its way back to its old class, especially since the early 1990s. Like all first-class wines from Bordelais, the wine captivates with primarily dark fruits such as blackcurrants or blackberries and cedarwood on the nose and on the palate.

Grape varieties and winemaking

The winery has 120 hectares of land, 81 hectares of which are planted with vines. The vineyard consists of three plots. The largest is located on a gravel and sand dome from the Günz Ice Age and borders on the property of Château Mouton-Rothschild . The grape varieties Cabernet Sauvignon (share 60%), Merlot (share 33%), Cabernet Franc (share 5%) and Petit Verdot (share 2%) are grown . The average age of the vines is 35 years, the planting density is (high) 9,000 vines per hectare. The winery has been working strictly biodynamically for several years and was the first large estate in Bordeaux to receive the official Agence Bio certification in 2010. In order to minimize the soil compaction caused by tractors, teams of horses are used in large numbers in the vineyards.

The harvest is done by hand, the grapes are then sorted. The must fermentation takes about four weeks. Château Pontet-Canet renews 60% of its barrique barrels every year. The wine matures in these for about 16 to 20 months, depending on the vintage. The wine is not filtered before bottling. Since the 2012 vintage, around a third of the harvest has been matured in amphora-like ceramic tanks specially developed for the estate.

The Pontet-Canet has a good aging potential. In good vintages, it is worth aging for 12 to 25 years. Château Pontet-Canet produces a second wine called Les Hauts de Pontet . Around 300,000 bottles of the first wine and around 60,000 bottles of the second wine are filled. The price of the " Grand Vin " is between 40 and 200 € per bottle. The 2005 vintage was rated extremely highly with 96 Parker points . The years 2009 and 2010 are rated particularly highly, although 2008 and 2012 are hardly inferior to them due to their more classic style.

history

The ownership structure of the agricultural land can be traced back to the early 14th century. In 1311 the land belonged to the feudal lord Pons de Castillon . As a result, the property was passed on to the family. In the 15th century the lands came to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester , the younger brother of Henry V. After the British defeat in the Hundred Years' War , the formerly English possession passed into French hands. A small part of the property passed through the Foix family to the notary Jacques de Ségur. At that time, not only smaller plots of today's château belonged to the lands. Jacques de Ségur also laid the first vineyards on the site of today's Château Lafite-Rothschild from 1670. His son Alexandre married the heiress of Château Latour in 1695 . From this marriage the son Nicolas-Alexandre de Ségur (1697–1755) emerged. After Nicolas-Alexandre expanded the property of Mouton in 1717 and bought Château Calon-Ségur , he sold Mouton to Joseph de Brane in 1720 (other sources name the year 1725), thus initiating the separation of Mouton and Lafite. An existing manor building and the middle part of the land went to Dominique Armailhacq and formed the beginning of Château d'Armailhac . François de Pontet, governor of the Médoc, bought the southernmost part of the land a few 100 m above the Gironde .

In 1757, his descendants bought the parcel called Canet , on which there was also a house of the same name. Since then, the wine produced there has been traded under the name Pontet-Canet . In 1855, the winery was raised to the rank of fifth plant in the classification of Bordeaux wineries (see the article Bordeaux wine (classification) ).

The winery remained in the possession of the de Pontet family until 1865 and was then bought by Hermann Cruse from Schleswig-Holstein (then part of Denmark). Even then, Mr. Cruse was earning his living in the wine trade with Bordeaux wines. He modernized on Pontet-Canet a. a. the plant of the vines, the technology for harvesting the grapes and in 1895 added farm buildings with what was then an ultra-modern sorting system for the harvested fruits. The berries were - and are still today - delivered to the first floor, sorted and land in the fermentation vats by gravity. However, the trading house Cruse failed to invest after the Second World War, so that the quality of the wines from Pontet-Canet continuously deteriorated. In 1960 Cruse bought Château Haut-Bages-Libéral through his company Société Civile Charreules. Shortly thereafter, the owners allocated some of the Haut-Bages-Libéral vineyards to the more profitable Château Pontet-Canet. When this practice became known, Cruse first had to part with Pontet-Canet and later also with Haut-Bages-Libéral.

In 1975 the winery was bought by Guy Tesseron. Due to the investments made and the quality-oriented expansion of the wines under his youngest son, Alfred Tesseron, the winery has been able to more than live up to its rank as 5ème cru since the beginning of the 1990s with the help of Émile Peynaud . Current managers are Gerald and Alfred Tesseron. The older son Michel and his sister Caroline Tesseron own the Château Lafon-Rochet winery in Saint-Estèphe .

Jean-Michel Comme has been the director responsible for the extension and assembly on Pontet-Canet since 1988. The estate is also advised by the well-known oenologist Michel Rolland .

literature

Web links

Website of the Château Pontet-Canet