2008 Chateau Pontet Canet Pauillac 750 ml

2008 Château Pontet-Canet: “A wine for our children’s children” — Robert Parker, Jr.

8 a.m. Reporting from Bordeaux. We just took mega doses of Doliprane (acetaminophen), hoping to loosen the screws on the vice at the base of our skulls. Our heads are pounding. Jet-lag, blanquette de veau, farm brie, crème caramel, a half-dozen bottles of vintage Bordeaux … oh to be young again.

Pierre Paillardon was one of the most decorated young sommeliers in France before he was recruited and professionally adopted by Jean-Michel Cazes, the colorful proprietor of Château Lynch-Bages. After three stints as president of large trading companies, Paillardon struck out on his own. As we were again reminded last evening, Pierre’s knowledge of the vintages, terroirs, and winemakers of the Left and Right Banks is encyclopedic and all but unparallelled.

Before dinner, Paillardon began by reading from an article published over a year ago by Matt Kramer of Wine Spectator that explained why, with the dollar gaining the upper hand over the euro, American collectors should and would refocus their attention on the Place de Bordeaux. “2009 and 2010 were two of the greatest vintages of my lifetime,” Pierre explained. “Some châteaux produced the richest and most long-living wines in their history. With the renewed strength of the dollar, there are at least a half-dozen Bordeaux that will age beautifully for the next THIRTY years, and are now selling for less than half the price of new releases from Napa Valley. Kramer was right. The Americans had given up on Bordeaux when the dollar dropped. Now they’re back!”

Of the six wines Paillardon poured last evening, two stood out most. The first was the 2010 Château Cantemerle, Parker’s “sleeper of the vintage” (more on this in coming days). The second was Alfred Tesseron’s heralded 2008 Château Pontet-Canet, one of a handful of Pauillacs from that highly structured vintage that have the depth, flesh, and intensity to be mistaken for the château’s herculean 2010.

For those of you who have laid down a few bottles of Robert Parker’s 100-point 2010 Pontet-Canet, we very much hope you’ve practiced patience and have yet to pop a cork. Parker suggested that Tesseron’s biodynamically farmed estate directly across the D205 from Mouton-Rothschild turned out one of the finest Bordeaux in the last FIFTY years in 2010, a bottle The Wine Advocate suggests will age effortlessly for the next 50 to 75 years!

Based on our tasting notes from last night, and as Paillardon asserted, the 2008 Château Pontet-Canet isn’t far behind.

The first sentence of Parker’s review from 2009, when he first tasted the 2008 Château Pontet-Canet from barrel, says it all: “A wine for our children’s children.” The third sentence is perhaps more telling: “Fashioned from incredibly low yields, a very late harvest, and a Draconian selection, the 2008 will not be close to drinkability for at least a decade, and it should still be in superb form circa 2060.”

Paillardon decanted the 2008 Pontet-Canet for two hours before serving. As he poured just a couple ounces into our Zalto Bordeaux stems, he said he had no intention of opening another bottle before his oldest son’s daughter’s wedding. We’d soon learn why.

Tasted over the course of three hours. Inky black in color. Perfectly primary on the nose, with explosive notes of black currant, crushed black fruits, tobacco, graphite, and mountain blueberry. Incredibly powerful on the attack, silken in texture, yet still tightly wound and showing no sign whatsoever of unwinding in the next decade, it would take nearly two hours for this herculean 2008 to peak out of its shell, just beginning to show off the massively concentrated underpinnings that explain why Parker called this a “first-growth-like” effort from Pontet-Canet.

P.S. Don’t buy this one for yourself. Buy it for your GRANDDAUGHTER!