2000 Smith Haut Lafitte

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The Cathiards have taken this chateau to the next level with the promotion of Fabien Teitgen from vineyard boss to technical director beginning in 2001. Teitgen looks for fruit that's ripe but not overripe, as he's after elegant wines with a lightness of touch. Under the direction of Daniel Cathiard, he has brought changes in vinification as well. Beginning with vintage 2002, a good 50% of the grapes went into the fermenter uncrushed, with extraction relying more on punching down of the cap rather than on pump-overs.

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Florence Cathiard describes this property's 2001 as "a wine of finish, not of attack." All of the malolactic fermentation here takes place in barriques, and the lees are stirred until December. The Cathiards picked their white grapes later than usual in 2001 and had the last of them in just before a storm on September 22.

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Due to "fingers of clay that promote water retention," Smith Haut Lafitte did not suffer unduly from the late-summer drought in 2000, according to Florence Cathiard. Still, the very thick skins of the vintage resulted in an extremely high index of polyphenols. The new vintage was the first made entirely in the estate new oak fermenters; the use of these small, conical vats allowed the estate to extract slowly. "Our red revolution started with the 2000," noted Cathiard, "but our white began to change with the '98. We used to think that we needed high acidity for the white wine to age, but then we noticed how fresh the '95 was three or four years after the harvest. The fruit that year had been picked very ripe, a good degree higher than usual and with lower acidity. We thought at the time that the wine wouldn't hold in bottle, but we were wrong. Now we look for almost overripe fruit each year, and it has become clear to us that the wine ages on richness, ripeness and overall balance rather than acid level."

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