2010 Château Gombaude-Guillot

Château Gombaude Guillot is an 18-acre estate in the Pomerol appellation of Bordeaux. It was founded in 1868 by the Belevier family and the estate is today owned and operated by Claire Laval, whose great grandmother was given the estate as part of her dowry. The estate makes about 2,500 cases a year and its second wine is Cadet de Gombaude. The blend of Gombaude-Guillot is 70% Merlot, 28% Cabernet Franc and 2% Malbec. Robert M. Parker Jr. has written that “when Gombaude-Guillot does everything right, it ranks as one of the top dozen Pomerols of the appellation.”

Pomerol is the smallest of Bordeaux’s red wine producing regions, with only about 2,000 acres of vineyards. Located on the east side of the Dordogne River, it is one of the so-called “right bank” appellations and therefore planted primarily to Merlot. Pomerol is unique in Bordeaux in that it is the only district never to have been rated in a classification system. Some historians think Pomerol’s location on the right bank made it unattractive to Bordeaux-based wine traders, who had plenty of wine from Medoc and Graves to export to England and northern Europe. Since ranking estates was essentially a marketing ploy to help brokers sell wine, ranking an area where they did little business held no interest for them. Pomerol didn’t get much attention from the international wine community until the 1960s, when Jean-Pierre Moueix, an entrepreneurial wine merchant, started buying some of Pomerol’s best estates and exporting the wines. Today the influential Moueix family owns Pomerol’s most famous estate, Château Pétrus, along with numerous other Pomerol estates. Pomerol wines, primarily Merlot blended with small amounts of Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon, are considered softer and less tannic than left bank Bordeaux.