2016 Château Certan-De-May

Château Certan-De-May is the Pomerol appellation, in France’s Bordeaux region. The 12-acre estate is small but well located on the highest ground in the vicinity, squeezed in between Vieux Château Certan and Petrus. The estate traces its history back several centuries, and in the early 19th century it was part of a larger parcel owned by a family from Scotland. But political upheavals in France led to a division of the estate, and the estate is today owned by the Barrau-Bader family. The estate is planted to 70% Merlot, 25% Cabernet Franc and 5% Cabernet Sauvignon. About 24,000 bottles are produced annually. Robert M. Parker Jr. has written that “this tiny gem of a vineyard has become a star in the Pomerol firmament.”

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.