Pétrus the perfect Merlot myth

Pétrus the perfect Merlot myth

Pétrus bottles have an average cost of 2.000€, which for great vintages can also become 68.000€. The brief and dazzling story of a non chateau

Read for you by Donatella Cinelli Colombini

It is out of every list but remains the myth of myths of Merlot on a worldwide scale and has its highest price among the top most expensive wines in the world on Wine Searcher.
I’ve only been there once during a course The Bordeaux Faculty of Oenology at theUniversity ofBordeaux and I remember that I was speechless for its small dimension and not at all monumental appearance. The vines practically reached the gate in front of the winery, on a flat piece of land. It was winter and the vines had been cut back, I remember that I together with other course members took some cuttings which we brought back toItaly in our luggage wit the intention of having, in our vineyards, a little piece of the Pomerol star.

The winery building is a low one with arch decorations, only recently ha sit been

enlargedusing a refectory designed by Herzog & de Meuron  the Swiss architects of the Allianz Arena in Monaco and the National Stadium in Beijing.

Everything, be it the old part and the new, is of a practically sacred austerity. As are the concrete vats, which when I visited, seemed old fashioned, and today in sight of the new fashion of egg shake vats in pure cement, seem to have been the foregoers of a modernity with ancient roots.

The Pétrus Merlot stays 21 months in new barriques and then in 54.000 bottles with a retrò label that is quite ugly. Nothing else. The myth is all in the11,4 hectares of Vineyard and in its mysterious soil which is clave and rich in iron, which, according to them, makes it different to all the other vineyards nearby. The doubt regarding the diversity of this terroir comes when we discover that the owners, the Moueix, control many of the allotments nearby.

To speak of sacredness is not an exaggeration in Pétrus, because everything has a sombre, slow and repetitive cadence of a wine ceremony. Even the winemaker Olivier Berrouet, has taken over the running of the cellar from his father when he was only 29 years old and with great surprise for all because he was working at Château Cheval Blanc, <<different terroir different grape variety but the same philosophy and search for excellence >> he said in an interview for Decanter where they asked him if he felt overpowered by the responsibility and the myth of Pétrus <<you must forget the name of the winery for which you are working and… concentrate on what the grapes are saying to you>>. Fantastic, here the grapes speak!
The Pétrus story also has some magic. It is a solitary and considering quite brief story because concentrated all after the Second World War. Queen Elizabeth served it at her wedding banquet in 1947, it was President John Kennedy preferred and, in more recent times it is also favoured by Julian Sark, actor in the Alias TV series.
In the Pétrus history there is also a court action which verges on a comedy. Before 2001, when Pétrus was bought by the Moueix, the present owners, half of it belonged to

Madame Lily Lacoste together with one of the most spectacular wine world heritages ever seen. With no offspring the very  very rich Lily lived until a very venerable age, when she was object of several strange financial goings on until the court filed an action against her companion, one of her assistants, and most of all against the  secrétaire général de la fondation catholique du Foyer  de Châteauneuf-de-Galaure, Francois Burel. After having given away  Pétrus the elderly lady had in fact given the Fondation on of the most famous  Chateaux in the world, Latour, 1er cru classé di Pauillac  where she was born, and that was hers to give. The agreement regarded am annuity of 44.000 € per year but ironically, they gave Lily the local supermarket table wines to drink with her meals. When her family found out they reported the fact: to be obliged to swap Pétrus for the French tavernello really was too much!