Chateau Petrus: Winemaking, Best Wines, Prices (2021)

Chateau Petrus, Pomerol: 10 Outstanding Wines To Buy in 2024

by Anthony Zhang

The exclusive Petrus red wine has nothing less than a star-studded fan base, including the British royal family members and the Kennedys!

The Petrus estate went as far as aging their extraordinary 2020 vintage wine in space. In 2021, Christie’s released this space wine at a private auction for $1M.

Let's explore Chateau Petrus in detail - the flavor profile of the wine, best vintages to buy, the estate’s vineyards, and winemaking practices. We’ll also look at why a bottle of Chateau Petrus is so expensive and if it’s worth investing in this Bordeaux wine.

An Introduction to Chateau Petrus

The Chateau Petrus vineyard is located in the wine-growing region of Pomerol in Bordeaux, France.

The Chateau Petrus wine estate, owned by the Mouiex family, is located in eastern Pomerol in the Bordeaux region of France, neighboring La Conseillante.

This Chateau produces one of the most exceptional single-varietal red wines using the Merlot grape.

The name “Chateau Petrus” comes from “St. Peter” (Petrus in Greek), meaning “rock.” During the warmer months, the soil at Chateau Petrus dries and becomes as hard as a rock.

The Petrus estate measures only 11.5 hectares - one of the smallest in Bordeaux.

Let’s explore the mouth-watering Petrus wine in detail.

Petrus Wine: Tasting Notes and Food Pairings

Chateau Petrus wine is bold, velvety, and soft with strong fruit flavors.

Petrus Grand Vin is bold, velvety, and soft with intense fruit flavors with medium to high acidity. This red wine is much loved for its elegance, intensity, and complexity.

The Merlot grape also adds incredible floral aromatics to the wine.

This opulent French wine can go with a sublime duck ragoût or Agneau De Pauillac, a lamb dish from Bordeaux. Other meat options to go with this wine bottle are pork, veal, and beef.

Petrus wines also pair deliciously with mushroom risotto or pasta with a creamy Bordeaux cheese sauce.

The Best Vintages of Chateau Petrus

Here’s a handpicked list of the best Petrus wines.

1947 Petrus Vintage
1951 Petrus Vintage
1961 Petrus Vintage
1968 Petrus Vintage
1982 Petrus Vintage
2000 Petrus Vintage
2005 Petrus Vintage
2010 Petrus Vintage
2015 Petrus Vintage
2018 Petrus Vintage

1. 1947 Petrus Vintage ($6,098)

The Bordeaux summer of 1947 was boiling hot, but thanks to the subsoil of blue clay, the Merlot grapes still had access to water. This year produced a rich, opulent Petrus Grand Vin with a palate of black fruit and unsmoked cigars.

2. 1951 Petrus Vintage ($7,186)

The second wine on the list is the 1951 vintage. This French wine is full, dry, and delicious with delightful tasting notes of licorice and the richness of ripe mulberry and vanilla oak. Despite its age, there is a bold freshness about this bottle.

3. 1961 Petrus Vintage ($10,590)

The 1961 vintage is a bold, earthy vintage wine with a palate of leather, truffle, and warm black plums.

4. 1968 Petrus Vintage ($5,920)

This bottle is a beautiful vintage from the end of the 60s. It is a bold, red wine bottle with notes of cinnamon stick, vanilla oak, and a fruit palate of dark chocolate-covered cherries.

5. 1982 Petrus Vintage ($5,647)

This Bordeaux wine is full of the richness of black fruit aromas, with a taste of ripe mulberry, Ceylon tea, and a subtle waft of red roses.

6. 2000 Petrus Vintage ($6,825)

This millennium vintage has a palate of chocolate, cinnamon stick, black cherry, and licorice with black currant and Ceylon tea undertones.

7. 2005 Petrus Vintage ($6,753)

This unique and elegant Bordeaux wine will take your breath away with a provocative ferrous undercurrent, an aroma of vanilla oak, and seductive notes of dark chocolate-covered cherries.

8. 2010 Petrus Vintage ($6,047)

This red wine has an exquisite bouquet of unsmoked cigars, a rich black fruit flavor, and the bold freshness of Ceylon tea and cinnamon stick.

9. 2015 Petrus Vintage ($5,131)

Though this Petrus Pomerol wine is only five years old, it is bold, elegant, and smooth. A wine lover will admire its black cherry and mulberry palate with a red rose and truffle aromas.

10. 2018 Petrus Vintage ($5,714)

Another rich red wine, this Petrus packs seductive dark fruit notes of black currant, black cherry, warm black plums, and the freshness of licorice. We recommend waiting for this fine wine to age before drinking - between 10 and 20 years, to be prudent. It's also a great investment wine.

So, what makes Petrus such an expensive wine?

Why is Chateau Petrus So Expensive?

The inimitable quality, scarcity, and popularity among wine critics will continue to drive up the desirability and prices of Chateau Petrus wine!

The exceptional terroir of the Pomerol appellation, the high-quality rootstocks, and the careful vinification make the Chateau Petrus Pomerol an inimitable wine!

Add to it the fact that Petrus’ vineyard is small, and the estate has a limited annual production (and some years, none at all) - only about 30,000 bottles.

This scarcity is one of the reasons why you often find this wine at prestigious wine auctions.

Why Should You Invest in Petrus Wine?

The very first owners of Chateau Petrus were the Arnaud family, who owned the Petrus estate for around 200 years.

The unique quality, scarcity, and popularity among wine critics like Robert Parker and wine magazines like Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate will continue to drive up the desirability and prices of Petrus wine.

The Petrus index (that tracks the price movement of the last ten vintages) - was up 37% over five years (2013-17), outperforming the Liv-ex 100 (up 19.9%) and the Bordeaux 500 (27%) over the same period.

Chateau Petrus also performs extraordinarily well at auctions, with many wine lovers prepared to pay whatever it takes to get their hands on a bottle of this outstanding wine.

For example: In 2018, at the Heritage Auction, a Chateau Petrus 2000 vintage was sold for $51,660. At the same auction, the 1990 vintage bottle drew $44,280, and the 1998 vintage was sold for $38,130.

In short, investing in a Chateau Petrus can potentially guarantee you handsome returns.

The “space wine” Petrus 2000 could potentially fetch a million dollars when auctioned. According to vine research scientist Philippe Darriet, it isn’t just any wine that has spent time in space, it’s a Petrus!” (It was aged in space for around 440 days in the Nicolas Gaume - led Space Cargo’s spacecraft.)

And you can do it effortlessly with a trusted wine investment firm, Vinovest, that helps wine collectors across the globe buy, store, and sell authentic and rare vintage wines.

So, why are Chateau Petrus Pomerol vintages so exceptional?

Chateau Petrus: Vineyard And Viticulture

Chateau Petrus stands out from the vineyards around it because of the uniqueness in terroir and grape processing techniques.

Chateau Petrus stands out from other vineyard plots because of its unique terroir and grape processing techniques carefully selected by Michel Gilet, Petrus’ viticulturist.

The vines are located on top of an ancient island mound known as Pétrus boutonnière or Petrus’ buttonhole, taking up roughly half of its area.

The blue clay soil in the buttonhole is over 40 million years old and is unique to the plot.

There are two layers of clay soil in the vineyard - the dark clay topsoil and an iron-rich, dark blue, smectite clay subsoil. This clay is very hard, but it absorbs and stores water which the vines soak up in summer.

Jean François Moueix believed this unique terroir was best for the Merlot grape variety - a red grape variety with a dark blue color, thin skin, and low tannin.

So, since 2011, only Merlot vines have been planted in the Petrus vineyard.

The Pomerol vines were planted in the 1950s, so the average age of a Chateau Petrus vine is around 65 years.

Chateau Petrus Winemaking Process

Chateau Petrus follows a low-yield, high-quality grape winemaking process.

They use the “green harvesting” (or éclaircissage) method for managing the vineyard - a crop thinning technique where unripe grape bunches are cut off. It allows the remaining grapes to ripen fully.

The grapes are handpicked and crushed gently, after which, they are placed in concrete vats for vinification (the process of fermenting grape juice into wine.)

Next, the grapes undergo maceration - a winemaking process where the crushed grapes impart tannin, color, and flavor to the wine.

The wine then ferments inside French oak barrels for 18-20 months. These are 50% new oak barrels that previously had water to cleanse their strong tannin taste.

Francois Veyssiere (Cellar master and collector of fruit trees) replaces the oak barrels in rotation because, as they age, they lose their ability to impart flavor and structure to the wine.

If the vines have a bad year and are not up to Petrus’ standard, then the estate doesn’t produce a vintage that year.

Petrus also does not produce a second wine.

A Brief History of Chateau Petrus

Jean-François Moueix and the Moueix family believed that the terroir of Chateau Petrus is better suited to the Merlot grape variety than to any other grape.

The Arnaud family, the estate’s first owner, boosted Petrus’ sales and price when their wine won the gold medal at the Paris Exhibition in 1878.

In the 20th Century, the Arnaud family created a share-holding company, “La Société Civile du Château,” and sold shares of the Petrus estate.

Slowly, Madame Edmond Loubat, who owned Château Latour à Pomerol, started acquiring these shares until she owned the entire estate by 1945.

Madame Loubat propelled the success of Petrus wine with her 1945 vintage.

In the same year, Jean Pierre Mouiex, owner of the Etablissements Jean Pierre Moueix negociant house, obtained Petrus’ exclusive selling rights.

In 1947, Madame Edmond Loubat gifted the Lord Mayor of London (who was there for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth) two Petrus bottles, successfully introducing it to British high society.

After a dreadful winter in 1956, Madame Loubat started practicing coppice harvesting in the vineyard. It involved cutting the vines on the surviving rootstocks instead of replanting.

After Madame Loubat’s death, Jean Moueix acquired the vineyard. He worked alongside esteemed winemaker Jean Claude Berroeut - the man behind excellent Lafleur, La Magdeleine, and Chateau Trotanoy wines.

Today, Jean Francois Moueix and Olivier Berrouet (son of Jean Claude Berrouet) own the vineyard. Colombian billionaire Alejandro Santo Domingo also has a 20% stake in the estate.

Let’s also take a quick look at the Pomerol appellation.

The Pomerol Appellation

Chateau Petrus isn’t one of the oldest vineyards you’ll come across, but it has a rich and fascinating history!

Pomerol is the smallest of Bordeaux’s five key wine regions and lies on the right bank of Bordeaux. It was granted AOC (Appellation of Controlled Origin) status in 1936.

This right bank region is also home to great vineyard sites like Château Gazin, Vieux Château Certan, and Château Trotanoy.

The Pomerol estates have been left out of more than one Bordeaux Classification, including the 1855 Bordeaux Classification and the Crus Bourgeois Classification, while regions like Medoc and Saint-Emilion were included.

Today, Pomerol houses some of the oldest vineyard sites and some of the most extraordinary estates, including Petrus and Le Pin.

Ready to invest in a coveted Petrus?

Curating an Impressive Wine Portfolio Couldn’t Get Easier!

The exceptional terroir of the Pomerol appellation, the high quality of the surviving rootstocks after harvest, and the careful winemaking process makes the Chateau Petrus Pomerol an inimitable bottle of wine!

Opening a bottle of Petrus Pomerol is an experience like no other. It is sheer elegance in a bottle while being an excellent investment wine.

And if you want to curate an impressive portfolio of wines, including Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chenin Blanc, and any other fine wine, Vinovestis undoubtedly your ideal wine investment partner.

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