Divine Wine

By Gordon M. Henry

The most famous fine French wines have traditionally come from the Medoc, a region north of Bordeaux. True wine lovers think nothing of paying $80 for a 1982 bottle of Chateau Lafite or Chateau Mouton. But many discriminating connoisseurs are paying even more for a once obscure, less aristocratic wine: Chateau Petrus. Produced for more than 130 years but virtually unknown in the U.S. until the 1960s, Petrus comes not from the famed Medoc but from a region to the east called Pomerol, which used to be disdained in Bordeaux wine circles. Now Chateau Petrus commands $250 a bottle for the acclaimed 1982 vintage, making it perhaps the most expensive wine for that year on the market. Older Petrus vintages occasionally fetch more than $1,000 a bottle at auction.

Despite the price, there are those who actually drink Petrus, and do so regularly. The French monthly food review Sel et Poivre (Salt and Pepper) calls Petrus "the most sought-after wine in the world." At New York City's Sherry-Lehmann Wines, President Michael Aaron says that Petrus is Actor Burgess Meredith's favorite wine, as well as a frequent pick of Herbert A. Allen, a Manhattan investment banker who used to own Columbia Pictures. Vogue Magazine Critic Martin Gersh describes a Petrus taste-testing session as "unquestionably one of the supreme wine experiences of my life." Wine experts praise Petrus' full-bodied, fruity flavor, but no one can adequately explain its new mystique.

At a fair in Paris in 1855, hundreds of wines were classified into five levels of quality, but Petrus was not even ranked. For many decades after that, Bordeaux traders disdained Petrus and other wines from Pomerol in favor of more prized labels from the Medoc, Sauternes and Graves regions. But the 1947 Petrus was so spectacular that word of the chateau began to spread throughout France.

In the 1960s, Petrus was introduced to American wine lovers by the late Henri Soule, owner of the tony Le Pavillon restaurant in New York. Explains Alexis Lichine, author of A Guide to the Wines and Vineyards of France: "It was served at Le Pavillon in the days when Onassis sat at a corner table. After that, Chateau Petrus became a status symbol, the sort of name dropped by people who wish to imply not only that they know wine but that they are in wine."

Petrus comes from a gray-stone chateau 15 miles east of Bordeaux that is co-owned by Jean-Pierre Moueix and Lily Lacoste-Loubat. The operation is run by Moueix's son Christian, an art collector and jogger who attributes Petrus' quality to the chateau's mature, 40-year-old vines and to his own green thumb. He personally oversees the cultivation of the vines and claims to have given each one individual attention. Says he: "I call them people. I have seen each of them." Every fall, when the grapes reach just the right degree of ripeness, 180 workers pick them swiftly over a two-day period.

One reason that Petrus is so costly is that only small quantities are produced. While the renowned Chateau Lafite has 225 acres that annually yield about 240,000 bottles, Chateau Petrus has just 30 acres that produce a scant 42,000 bottles. Says John Laird, a vice president for Seagram Chateau & Estate Wines, the largest U.S. distributor of Petrus: "We ration it out with an eyedropper."

Its buyers, however, do not exactly ration their funds. In a wild auction at the Chicago office of Christie's in 1981, one exuberant connoisseur paid $13,000 for a jeroboam (equal to six bottles) of Petrus 1961. Such princely prices have prompted Aaron of Sherry-Lehmann to call Petrus "the Rolls-Royce of all wines." Unfortunately, it is not possible to open a bottle just for a test drive.

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York ) and Adam Zagorin/Paris