2005 Château La Tour Carnet, 12-bottle Lot, Wood Case

Château La Tour Carnet in Saint Laurent Médoc has been a wine-producing estate since the 16th century. In 1999 French wine magnate Bernard Margrez purchased the estate with its 147 acres of vineyards. The flagship wines is 56% Merlot, 40% Cabernet Sauvignon, 3% Petit Verdot and 1% Cabernet Franc. The estate’s second wine is Les Pensées de la Tour Carnet, a blend of 45% Merlot and 56% Cabernet Sauvignon. Michel Rolland is the consulting enologist for both wines.

Bordeaux is the world’s most famous fine-wine producing region. Even non-wine drinkers recognize the names of Bordeaux’s celebrated wines, such as Margaux and Lafite-Rothschild. Located near the Atlantic coast in southwest France, the region takes its name from the seaport city of Bordeaux, a wine trading center with an outstanding site on the Garonne River and easy access to the Atlantic. Like most French wine regions, Bordeaux’s first vineyards were planted by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago, then tended by medieval monks. Aristocrats and nobility later owned the region’s best estates and today estates are owned by everyone from non-French business conglomerates to families who have been proprietors for generations. Bordeaux has nearly 280,000 acres of vineyards, 57 appellations and 10,000 wine-producing châteaux. Bordeaux is bifurcated by the Gironde Estuary into so-called “right bank” and “left bank” appellations. Bordeaux’s red wines are blends of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc and Malbec. It also makes white wines of Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle. There are several classification systems in Bordeaux. All are attempts to rank the estates based on the historic quality of the wines.