Juxtapose With You: Pétrus, Lafleur & Le Pin

BY NEAL MARTIN | FEBRUARY 23, 2018

During the countless days researching my Pomerol tome there were inevitably periods between visits when I had to face the fact there is absolutely nothing to do there. Not even a café to buy a half-decent reviving espresso to keep me awake. As a consequence, I would sit in my rented car observing the wide expanse of etiolated nothingness of mid-winter Pomerol and mentally assemble what the ultimate Pomerol tasting might look like. I imagined dining at El Bulli, re-opened just for one night, the sommelier pouring ex-cellar magnums of postwar vintages such as 1945, 1947 and 1949. And at this phantasmal dinner, invitations to all male attendees had mysteriously been lost in the post so that only two invitees turn up, namely Salma Hayek and Margot Robbie.

Then I thought, hold on old chap. There is a higher probability of Salma and Margot turning up at this dinner than those bottles. Let’s be realistic. Upon further contemplation this Pomerol ne plus ultra shindig was obvious: a comparison of the Pétrus, Lafleur and Le Pin triumvirate as seen through the prism of the most revered vintages. Following the publication of my book, a friend Omar Khan, who founded the International Business & Wine Society, happened to ask what my dream tasting might be. So, I confessed (missing out Salma and Margot – I presumed Omar would take that as a given.) “Leave it to me,” he replied, and I forgot all about it. Two years later he called to advise that he had finally assembled all the bottles and could I propose a suitable date. He apologized for taking so long, the culprit, the 1982 Le Pin. You cannot simply phone up Jacques Thienpont and ask him if he could spare a coupe of bottles because he does not have any himself. Finally, one was found, albeit at considerable expense. I just prayed that it would not be corked. 

The private dinner was held over a weekend with just a handful of attendees. Pétrus, Lafleur and Le Pin all served side by side, vintage by vintage commencing with the 2005, followed by 1998, 1995, 1990, 1989, 1982 and 1975, the last excluding Le Pin since it only debuted in 1979. I would be able to observe the wines over the course of three or four hours, crucial for bottles such as these. Like many, I remembered Robert Parker’s remark in his Wine Buyers’ Guide that only millionaires would be drinking the 1989 and 1990 Pétrus side-by-side. I was a long way off becoming a millionaire. But for this night I would feel like the richest man in the world.

Juxtapose With You

I want to stress something before continuing. The motivation of this dinner was not to divine who might be best. It was no beauty pageant. Yes, I know that you could average out my scores, numerically deduce which I prefer. That was not its raison d’être. Rather the idea was to see if we could ascertain the style of each wine, their differences and similarities, their respective evolution in bottle in terms of secondary aromas and flavors, in order for me to use this insight in my next edition of the book.

Before examining the vintages, we should remind ourselves of the basics. Firstly, we should examine their histories. The genesis of both Lafleur and Pétrus dates back to the late 19th century when Pomerol was simply an unknown backwater of Bordeaux. The seeds of Lafleur were sown in 1872 when Henri Greloud bought a small parcel of vines while it was the Arnaud family that assembled Pétrus. (My one failure in the first edition of the Pomerol book was to discover the amalgamation of these parcels after the publishing, but the second edition will include this information as a friend has filled in this crucial missing piece of the jigsaw.) Le Pin is a comparative arriviste, debuting with the 1979 vintage after widower Mme. Loubie sold her single hectare of vines to Gérard Thienpont in March that year, whereupon Gérard handed it to his nephew Jacques to run.

In terms of size, Pétrus is the largest at 11.5-hectares, followed by Lafleur’s 4.5-hectares and Le Pin at just 2.7-hectares, the latter a piecemeal expansion since only 0.6-hectares were in production in its first three years. Geographically, Petrus and Lafleur lie in close proximity, contiguously in the southeast corner of the vineyard, whereas Le Pin is located further south, just outside the village of Catusseau. However, soil matters more than map co-ordinates. Even though Pétrus and Lafleur are virtual neighbors, the terroir differs. Pétrus lies on the so-called “buttonhole” of blue clay called smectite. You will have to refer to my book for a molecular explanation of the advantage it gives to vines, but essentially smectite is supremely gifted at water absorption and retention. Lafleur does not possess any vines on blue clay, but sits on the gravel plateau. However, it is not homogenous, the land a veritable “mosaic of geological profiles” consisting of gravel, clay, silt and sand.

A little gift for Vinous readers. This is the original “cartographic masterpiece” sketched by Jacques Guinaudeau for my book. He painstakingly colored in the mosaic of soil profiles, only for the printed copy to be in black and white. So, for the first time, here is the original version replete with the ring bindings on the sketchbook that housed all the growers’ maps. Sadly, it went missing.