Pomerol. Small, mighty and built on blue clay.

Bordeaux’s tiny Right Bank star

Pomerol has only about 800 hectares of vines, shared by roughly 200 growers, out of some 111,000 hectares in all of Bordeaux. Petrus covers around 11.5 hectares and Le Pin less than three, tiny compared with the great estates of the Médoc. Pomerol sits just west of Saint-Émilion on the Right Bank, with its satellite appellation Lalande-de-Pomerol to the north, a good source of value wines in a similar style.

The wines are rich and hedonistic, with soft tannins, silky texture and plum and damson fruit that evolves into earth, winter spice and truffle. Pomerol was a late starter. Farmers only turned to vines in the 1700s, the area was largely white wine country until the late 1800s, and Merlot only arrived in force after phylloxera.

Merlot, Cabernet Franc and the blue clay

The Right Bank is Merlot territory, and some estates, like Petrus, are planted entirely with Merlot. Cabernet Franc is the second grape. How do you tell Pomerol from Saint-Émilion? The hosts explain that Pomerol is a little warmer and flatter, rising only to 39 meters, so its wines tend to be rounder with softer tannin and acidity, while Saint-Émilion from the limestone plateau often shows more color, acidity and tannin.

The most famous terroir is the dense, roughly 40-million-year-old blue clay in the northeast of the plateau, on which Petrus sits almost entirely. Vines struggle to push through it, which concentrates the berries. Elsewhere the plateau mixes clay, iron and gravel, with lighter, sandier soils lower down. Standing near Cheval Blanc, L’Évangile and Petrus, Susie and Andreas discover that the famous clay is not quite as blue as its name, and talk about how climate change may bring more Cabernet into the vineyards.

No classification, sky-high prices

Pomerol is the only major Bordeaux fine wine appellation without a classification. Estates are known simply by name: Petrus, Lafleur, La Fleur-Petrus, Vieux Château Certan, La Conseillante and others. Prices range from under fifty euros to thousands per bottle, and vineyard land is among the most expensive in France. The region’s global fame took off with the 1982 vintage and the critics who praised it.

The episode opens with a story that sounds like science fiction: a case of wine sent to age on the International Space Station, later revealed to be Petrus 2000. Find out what tasters noticed when it came back to Earth.

Wine detectives and counterfeit bottles

High prices attract fraud. The episode recalls the cases of Hardy Rodenstock and Rudy Kurniawan, and Susie explains how a Bordeaux laboratory can date wine without opening the bottle by measuring cesium-137, a radioactive isotope only present since 1945.

Then, dressed as Sherlock Holmes and Watson, the hosts meet counterfeit expert Michael Egan. Using a fake and a genuine bottle of a famous 1982 Pomerol, he shows the tiny details that give a forgery away, and explains what châteaux now do to protect their bottles. You will be surprised how much of the fine wine market he believes is fake.

Three Pomerols and a daring fish pairing

Susie pours three wines at different prices: Château L’Évangile 2012 from a cooler vintage that Andreas rates highly in Pomerol, Le Clos du Beau-Père 2019 from Garagiste pioneer Jean-Luc Thunevin, and Le Bon Pasteur 2020, the estate made famous by Michel Rolland’s family. Hear which one reminds Susie of black forest cake.

Chef Alexandre Baumard takes on a real challenge: fish with red wine. He serves a firm-fleshed Atlantic rockfish with beetroot and a red wine sauce. Andreas explains why oily fish can make tannins taste metallic, and how earthy, slightly sweet beetroot builds a bridge to ripe Pomerol.

Go furtherStudying Bordeaux in depth? The Bordeaux Master-Level program from the Wine Scholar Guild is a natural next step after this episode.