In 1855 the organisers of the Paris Exposition asked Bordeaux to produce a ranking of its wines. The brokers who compiled it did not taste anything. They went to their own ledgers and sorted the estates of the Medoc by the prices those estates had been fetching over the preceding decades, then drew lines across the list and called the bands first through fifth growth.
It was a price survey. That is all it ever was, and it was an honest one, because in a market where the same merchants traded the same wines every year, price was a reasonable proxy for reputation and reputation was a reasonable proxy for quality. The list was meant to describe the market of that moment.
It has been amended once in 170 years. Vineyards have been sold, split, replanted, drained, neglected and rebuilt. Owners have gone bankrupt and been replaced by insurance companies and, more recently, by people with technology fortunes. None of that moves an estate up or down the 1855 list, because the list is frozen. What it measures is what a broker thought of a name in the reign of Napoleon III.
The fifth growth on the good plateau
Which brings us to a property in Pauillac that sits on the gravel plateau immediately next to Mouton Rothschild — the same soil, the same drainage, the same aspect — and which the 1855 brokers placed in the fifth band. Chateau Pontet-Canet spent most of the twentieth century selling at fifth-growth prices while occupying first-growth ground, and for a long stretch it made wine that justified the ranking rather than the address.
The Tesseron family bought it in 1975. The serious change came later, from the 2000s, and it was agricultural rather than commercial.
What biodynamics does, and what it does not
The estate went organic, then converted the whole property to biodynamic farming and became one of the first classified growths in the Medoc to be certified. In practice that means no synthetic fertiliser, herbicide or systemic fungicide; composts and plant preparations applied on a calendar tied to the lunar cycle; and a return to ploughing with draught horses on the plots where tractor weight was compacting the soil. Part of the wine now ages in clay amphorae made from the estate's own soil rather than in oak.
Some of this has a clear mechanism and some of it does not. Ploughing with horses instead of a tractor genuinely reduces soil compaction, which changes how deep the roots go and how the vine handles a dry summer. Not spraying systemic chemicals changes what lives in the soil. The lunar calendar has no demonstrated mechanism at all. What matters commercially is that biodynamic farming forces a level of attention per vine that industrial viticulture does not, and attention is the thing that shows up in the glass.
Here is the part people get wrong. Biodynamic does not mean light, gentle, low-intervention or natural-tasting. Pontet-Canet is a dense, deeply coloured, firmly tannic Pauillac with substantial new oak. It is one of the more structured wines in the commune. If you are expecting something delicate because of the farming, you have the wrong bottle.
What we have
The Pontet-Canet vintages we hold are sorted by price, lowest first. There is only one wine, so the range is a range of years, and the years divide into three groups.
The classical mid-decade vintages. 2012 at around HK$728, 2013 at around HK$688, and 2014 at around HK$828. Proportioned rather than powerful, drinking now with air.
The recent releases. 2021 at around HK$680 is a cooler, fresher vintage and still young.
The trophy years and the old bottles. 2009 at around HK$2,380 is the ripe, heavily reviewed vintage and priced accordingly. Further back, 2007 at around HK$698 is a mature bottle from a difficult year, which is a different kind of purchase again.
What we would pick, and why
2012, around HK$728. This is the sweet spot. It is fully biodynamic-era fruit, it is thirteen years old so the tannins have softened into the wine, and it comes from a vintage that critics found merely good — which is precisely why it costs a third of what 2009 does while tasting like the same estate. Decant it an hour ahead.
2014, around HK$828. A better vintage than 2012 in most assessments, still firm, and the one to buy if you want a bottle that will keep improving for another five or six years rather than one to open this quarter.
2009, around HK$2,380, is genuinely a great bottle of wine and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But roughly two-thirds of that price is the vintage's reputation and the resale market attached to it. If the wine is being drunk rather than traded, the 2012 delivers most of the experience for a third of the money.
Who should not buy this
Anyone opening a bottle tonight without a decanter. Young Pontet-Canet is tannic to the point of being unpleasant straight from the neck, and the mid-2010s vintages need an hour of air minimum. If that is not going to happen, buy something else and spend less.
Anyone buying it because it is farmed biodynamically and they want a lighter, more transparent style of red. That is a reasonable thing to want and this is not the wine that provides it.
And anyone buying the 2009 to lay down in a Hong Kong flat without cooling. Heat cycling will do more damage to that bottle over five summers than the difference between a good vintage and a great one will ever recover. Either store it properly or buy a vintage that is ready now and drink it.