1998 Château La Conseillante, 12-bottle Lot, Wood Case

Château La Conseillante, a Pomerol estate, was founded in 1871 by the Nicolas family. Today the 30-acre estate is still owned and managed by the Nicolas family. Like other wines in the Pomerol appellation, La Conseillante is unclassified. La Conseillante however is considered one of the region’s best wines, and Robert M. Parker Jr. has written that the estate “produces some of this appellation’s most elegant, lush, and delicious wines…La Conseillante is a meticulously made wine.” The blend is typically 70% Merlot, 25% Cabernet Franc and 5% Malbec. About 6,000 cases are produced annually. There is no second wine.

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.

"Adjoining Petrus, L'Evangile and Vieux-Chateau-Certan it is not surprising that this is one of the top Pomerols"- Clive Coates MW