2003 La Conseillante

Earlier this year, Managing Director Jean-Valmy Nicolas invited me to the first-floor tasting room to taste through a comprehensive line-up of both La Conseillante and their second wine, Duo du Conseillante. These notes are augmented by those taken at recent private tastings, including an excellent soirée at “Ten Trinity” organized by Omar Kahn for his “International Business and Wine” series of dinners in March. I have also included some notes taken from my Pomerol tome.

Maitre de chai Patrick Arguti told me that when the team here analyzed the grapes they saw that the degrees were mounting and made the decision to pick very early, "at the same time as Petrus," to keep freshness and a healthy pH. Very little extraction was done for fear of hardening the wine. There's a coolness to the young Conseillante, and yet there's plenty of silkiness underneath and a generous alcohol level of 13.8%. "The wine will age a long time on its acidity [3.8 grams], which reinforces the tannic structure of the wine," Arguti told me. The young 2005 is aging in all-new barrels. Arguti noted that the crop level was 37 hectoliters per hectare in 2005, and that in the two hot-year vintages of 1989 and 1990 La Conseillante made 60 hectoliters per hectare.

Director Jean-Michel Laporte told me he has changed only "little things" since taking over here after the 2003 harvest. He has focused on more precise harvesting (the estate plans to add some smaller fermenters in the next couple of years) and he seeks to extract more at the beginning of the maceration, and then keep things calmer during the second half. In 2004, he did a four-day cold soak and then seven to ten days of post-fermentation maceration. "There was already a lot of color in the must during the cold soak," he told me. "The pips were ripe in 2004 but only barely." The 2004 represents a selection of 85%; the other 15% of the crop was sold off in bulk, as La Conseillante has no second wine. I think of La Conseillante as the Burgundy of Pomerol, in much the same way that Rol Valentin is the Burgundy of St. Emilion.

On my visit to La Conseillante this spring, I tasted the three vintages that were made by M. de Lamy, who has since returned to his family's domain in Lezignan-Corbieres. According to new director Jean-Michel Laporte, Lamy initiated a cold maceration here, a step that brought more fruit and a suppler structure to the last three vintages. At La Conseillante, said Laporte, a short pruning is the most effective technique to control crop levels, but two green harvests are also routinely carried out, even in vintage 2003. The estate also routinely does two effeuillages, though in the broiling summer of 2003, happily, the second leaf-pulling was skipped. The 50% of the estate on the Pomerol side of the road is planted on clay, notes Laporte; La Conseillante's acreage closer to Cheval Blanc, which includes its cabernet franc, is on more gravelly soil, with clay underneath. "La Conseillante is often tricky to taste from barrel early on," says Laporte. "Then it develops so quickly that you think it's getting old, and then it gets fresh again," he went on. "There are always a lot of peaks and valleys." The estate harvested very early in 2003, bringing in the entire crop during the first seven days of September. A sorting table was used to eliminate the grapes that had been cooked by the sun.