Going Back to My Roots: Putting Liber Pater In Context

BY NEAL MARTIN | JULY 05, 2023

How much?

That’s the natural response whenever the unenlightened are enlightened about the cost of a bottle of Liber Pater. It is a wine that almost seems to revel in its exorbitant price tag to the extent that one rightfully asks whether that is its raison d’être? Liber Pater and its recusant architect, Loïc Pasquet, divide opinion like Moses and the Red Sea, yet there is more to Liber Pater than pecuniary value. It is a lightning rod that questions contemporary winemaking and contentiously provides answers. You just have to wade through a lot of guff to get to the core of what it’s about.

This article seeks to separate the marketing and self-mythologizing from Liber Pater’s prosaic entity as mortal “fermented grape juice”. There is no genuflection nor pre-empted skewering. Instead, I endeavor to disentangle the hype and half-truths to create discourse, all without pulling punches. The result is an unintended lengthy article because the more I dug, the more issues it unearthed, and the more intrigued I became. If the wine does not pique your interest, but you are intrigued by present-day viticulture, then read on.

And yes, yes, yes…I will answer the banal question…

How can a bottle of wine be worth €35,000?

The Invitation

Earlier this year, I was invited to a dinner hosted by Birley’s Wine Club at Matteo’s, one of the restaurants inside labyrinthine Annabel’s in Mayfair, where Loïc Pasquet would guide us through three of his wines. It was immediately apparent that this was no run-of-the-mill wine event. Greeted by pre-prandial chatter and a chanteuse belting out the latest hits of 1973 accompanied by a tinkling baby grand, I clocked Pasquet deep in conversation yonder. Would I have a chance to converse directly? More to the point, was he aware of the clear and present danger that a critic who does not mince his words was amidst?

Now that the mise-en-scene is established, a bit of background. A goody-bag handed on departure contained a manga comic that details his story cell-by-cell, a refreshing change from dry monographs even if it does portray its protagonist as a messianic figure battling against the world - informative, if knowingly vainglorious. I won’t delve into the history too much. Essentially, the mid-forties Poitier-born winemaker was bitten by the wine-collecting bug as an adolescent, though instead of pursuing a career in wine, he studied engineering in Dijon. Ennui inevitably festered, and wine became his all-consuming passion. The more he learned, the more Pasquet became skeptical about the globalization of grape varieties and industrialization of wine, convinced that Bordeaux had forsaken its identity when it banned its gallimaufry of indigenous varieties and replanted authorized quasi-monoculture of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot. Compounding this alleged loss of identity was the whole-scale re-grafting onto phylloxera-resistant American rootstock.

“What if we could rediscover the taste of Bordeaux wine?” Pasquet provocatively asks in the aforementioned manga, which begs the question, what exactly have I been tasting all this time?

Loïc Pasquet guides the attendees through three Liber Pater wines.