Château Pontet-Canet

The Free Bacchus Story

There are ten draft horses at Pontet-Canet, stabled in buildings made from old wine barrels. They are not there for photographs. They are there because a horse does not compact soil the way a tractor does, and on this particular clay, compaction is the thing that matters.

The estate is a Fifth Growth in Pauillac, ranked in the lowest tier of a classification drawn up in 1855 on the basis of what wines were selling for at the time. For most of the following century and a half it made wine that did not deserve its extraordinary gravel plateau, and the Tesseron family, who bought it in 1975, have been unusually candid about the reasons: a period of learning, then a crisis in cognac that limited what could be spent on repair.

The turn came from the technical director, Jean-Michel Comme, who farmed biodynamically on his own small property and brought Alfred Tesseron a wine to taste. Tesseron said it did not taste like his own — too fresh, too energetic. It was Comme's first biodynamic vintage. A fourteen-hectare trial followed in 2004, then the whole estate. In 2007 mildew pressure forced them to abandon the conversion mid-course and use chemicals one final time; they began again, and certification followed in 2010, making Pontet-Canet the first classified growth in the Médoc to hold both organic and biodynamic accreditation, with Demeter added later.

The estate now trades alongside second growths, and the trade calls houses like it the flying fifths; the 2009 and 2010 vintages each earned a perfect hundred points. The 1855 list will not be revised, having been meaningfully amended once in 170 years, so Pontet-Canet simply went around it, which is a useful reminder that a rank on a label records a judgement made at a moment, not a fact about what is in the bottle now.