Lacoste Borie 2001

The 2001 vintage in Pauillac

Vintage benchmark: 91/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A steady season closing with a cool September gave fine, aromatic wines, long unfairly overshadowed by 2000.

Overall reading of the year’s season across Pauillac. An estate can depart from it sharply, in frost or hail years, where two neighbours did not make the same vintage. What this particular wine actually gave is on its technical sheet and in the scores above.

Tasting

This wine is very characteristic of the vintage, with great freshness of fruit from the fine ripening of the Cabernets. The colour is a beautiful ruby with violet hues. The intense aromatic presence with fresh tannins gives a lively style of great finesse that offers a lot of pleasure already today.

The vintage

After a mild, wet winter, temperatures rose and rainfall fell. Flowering went well and was uniform. Mid-veraison was noted on 12 August, a normal date compared with the previous twenty years. The slow, steady ripening ended with a cool and moderately humid period in September. Harvest began on 1 October for the Merlots and on 6 October for the Cabernet Sauvignons, in optimal conditions: warm days and cool nights. The weather of the final weeks allowed this vintage to preserve all its freshness and purity of fruit, and no doubt helped refine its particularly dynamic aromatic profile.

Terroir

Grand-Puy-Lacoste enjoys an exceptional terroir. The soil is made up of gravels, that is to say alluvial stones that provide excellent drainage. The distinctive character of the Médoc soil is part of a history going back two million years, for the gravels are geological witnesses of the Quaternary era. These stones, brought down from the Pyrenees and carried by the Garonne, were deposited over time on the banks of the Gironde, its estuary. Today the layers, of varying depth, are made up of gravel mixed with sand and a little clay. This gravelly soil has the advantage of retaining heat and returning it to the vine at night, which eliminates excessive temperature swings and encourages the harmonious ripening of the bunches.