In a steady winter drizzle 30 minutes outside Bordeaux, the tiny hamlet of Pichou appears abandoned save for a rugged-looking fellow in overalls and wellies, with the long, flowing hair of a romance-novel cover model, plowing a field of twigs behind a strapping white horse. Vineyards generally don’t look like much in late winter, but the barrenness here is extreme. Where are the trellises, the wires, the thick vine stumps? Can this muddy field really belong to the controversial vintner who makes the world’s most expensive wine?
Loïc Pasquet pulls up in a dirt-splattered gray utility van and jumps out to greet us. He points to the sodden ground covered with sticks, stones, grass, and clumps of weeds and tells us about the grape varieties grown here and about how the rows are planted in such a way that they can be plowed in three different directions, like a tic-tac-toe board. For someone who socializes with royalty and makes a wine that sells for roughly $33,000 a bottle, the 48-year-old Pasquet is unassuming in person. His hiking boots, Levi’s, fisherman’s sweater, and rain-dotted glasses make him appear more like a working farmer than an innovative winemaker. Or, for that matter, the self-promotional publicity hound that some in the industry consider him to be.
We first met Pasquet at the Golden Vines Awards, dubbed the Oscars of Fine Wine, in Paris in October 2023. His Liber Pater 2007 had been poured for the assembled guests in the ornate gallery of Paris’s Opéra Garnier to accompany the cuisine of star chefs Alain Ducasse and Akrame Benallal. The wine was stunning, its bold fruit flavors, with touches of smoke and chocolate, making it seem far younger than its 16 years. It soon became the wine that everyone at the awards was talking about, either praising it for its taste or chattering about the cost (sometimes both), with guests openly debating the sky-high price tag.
From that point, we were determined to learn more about Liber Pater and Pasquet’s work. Which is how we ended up standing in the rain at the edge of the 1.7-acre Denarius vineyard. With a price tag of about $600, Denarius is Liber Pater’s less-expensive label, commonly called a second wine, though Pasquet detests the term. “It’s not a second wine,” he insists. “It’s two different plots.” While both offerings are 100 percent ungrafted, organic, and made with native grape varieties, he says that, in the Denarius vineyard, “we have more clay, so the wine is very soft, while Liber Pater is very elegant, more for the gods.”
As it turned out, the wine at Golden Vines—a 2007 vintage priced about $4,500—was hardly cheap but only a fraction of the figure that recent Liber Pater vintages command. The sevenfold price increase, to $33,000, is due to the fact that the composition of vintages made prior to 2015 included only 10 percent ungrafted vines and older grape varieties. The vastly more expensive vintages produced since are composed of “100 percent native varieties and 100 percent ungrafted Franc de Pied,” Pasquet says.
Still, most small-quantity wines cost between $150 and $600 per bottle. Why is his so much more? In response, Pasquet tosses out a line we would come to hear many times throughout our time together: “What is the price you are ready to pay to have dinner with Napoleon?”
Of course, the early-19th-century French emperor remains resolutely dead. But Pasquet has managed to resurrect lost or forgotten grape varieties—those that grew in Bordeaux prior to the Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855, when Napoleon III requested a classification system for the region’s top wines—to be displayed at that year’s Paris Exposition. These historic varieties are the grapes that thrived before the phylloxera louse ravaged European vineyards in the late 19th century, nearly destroying the global wine industry. Pasquet found some growing on his land when he bought it, and he has re-propagated them in his decidedly low-tech nursery. As perhaps the only person now working with these throwbacks, he feels he’s offering oenophiles time travel in a glass.
It’s a high-risk proposition. The majority of grapevines around the world, including in Europe, are grafted onto American rootstock, which is resistant to phylloxera. But Pasquet has planted both of his vineyards with Franc de Pied, or ungrafted vines. “Nobody else on the Earth makes this type of wine, because we use native varieties; it’s totally Franc de Pied, and we produce only 500 bottles,” he says. And he doesn’t produce Liber Pater every year, adding to its rarity. “This is very exclusive, and all the wine lovers in the world want to taste it because it offers the possibility to taste a wine like wine was before phylloxera.”
Pasquet’s unusual growing practices, and his pitch about “dinner with Napoleon,” raise a lot of hackles. In the fall of 2015, vandals with pruning shears cut down 10 percent of the vines on one of his plots. He has also been sued for his unconventional vineyard methods; the powerful organization decried his use of ungrafted vines in Bordeaux due to the risk of phylloxera contamination.
Click HERE to read the full article.