1996 Château Le Bon-Pasteur

Château Le Bon Pasteur is owned and run by Michel Rolland, the famous oenologist who has worked as a highly regarded winemaking consultant throughout most of the wine producing regions of the world. The 16-acre estate he owns with his wife Dany is in Pomerol. Its vineyards are planted to 80% Merlot and 20% Cabernet Franc. About 30,000 bottles are produced annually. Robert M. Parker Jr. has written that “Le Bon Pasteur is one of the finest Pomerols…it is always seductive…and characterized by a round, rich, generous, and ripe fruit…”

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.