Château Lafleur

Lafleur is four and a half hectares of Pomerol plateau beside Petrus, a modest farmhouse, and one of the most coveted wines on earth. The Guinaudeau family — Jacques, now his son Baptiste and Julie — farm a mosaic of gravel and clay planted to nearly half old Cabernet Franc, the Bouchet vines whose massale cuttings the family guards like heirlooms. That Franc is the secret: where its neighbor is opulent, Lafleur is ethereal — floral, mineral, almost Burgundian in its transparency, yet capable of outliving nearly everything else in Bordeaux. Production is tiny, selection ruthless (Pensées de Lafleur takes what does not make the grand vin), and the market long ago concluded what tasters keep rediscovering: there is nothing else like it.