2009 Chateau Haut-Carles Fronsac 750 ml

The Jewel of Fronsac: 2009 Haut-Carles

It was April 2010, an afternoon we’ll never forget. With the dollar getting pummeled by the euro and Chinese importers swarming the Place de Bordeaux, we joined 300 wine professionals at a conference in Bordeaux to listen to Professor Denis Dubourdieu pass judgement on the harvest of 2009.

As the brilliant, if irascible, chairman of the enology department at l’Université de Bordeaux stepped to the microphone, the crowd fell silent. In painstaking detail, Dubourdieu described the five elements of a “perfect” vintage. Then the inventive enologist, who has always had a flair for the dramatic, paused, letting the tension build. The 2009 vintage, he concluded, was “five for five.”

In the months that followed, Robert Parker poured fuel on the vintage fire, publishing a bevy of 100-point reviews, pushing prices of the 2009s into the stratosphere.

Since we entered the market on January 27th, 2015, over 3,000 members have purchased vintage Bordeaux for over $125/bottle. Many have raved about the “perfect provenance” of their WineAccess purchases — not surprising, as every case we’ve purchased was drawn directly from proprietors’ cellars. In recent months, some of the most avid collectors have also filled our inboxes with bargain requests, asking us to seek out perfectly stored, highly rated “every day” Bordeaux from Professor Dubourdieu’s perfect vintage.

We took those requests to heart. After four months of banging our heads against cellar walls, we finally hit paydirt.

Spitting distance from the Pomerol line — and in full view of Pomerol’s new 100-point darling, Château Troplong Mondot — Stéphane Droulers and his wife, Constance Chastenet de Castaing, are fashioning deeply extracted, lavish reds at Château de Carles, the 20-hectare jewel of Fronsac.

Droulers, a banker at Lazard Frères, has invested aggressively in Haut-Carles since 2007 — bringing together three of the most sought-after consultants on the Right Bank. With a Libournais Dream Team of Jean-Luc Thunevin, Dr. Alain Raynaud, and Jean-Philippe Fort (the uber-talented enologist from Michel Rolland’s consultancy), by our scorecards and The Wine Advocate’s Haut-Carles seems more like “un petit Pomerol” than another Fronsac.

Now, after three years of cellaring, the 2009 Haut-Carles highlights what’s so irresistible about this ultra-ripe vintage on the Right Bank. Dark purple in color, infused with still perfectly primary aromas of crushed black fruits, graphite, violets, and tobacco. Deeply concentrated, beautifully focused, and pure, packed with black-fruit preserves, Parker called it “rich and clearly an over-achiever in this vintage or any other. Drink it over the next 10-15+ years!”

92 points from The Wine Advocate. $34/bottle. 420 bottles. Given the small quantity, in fairness to others, please limit purchases to no more than 12 bottles.