The Price of Elegance

“I feel like Van Gogh,” mused Jacques Thienpont, owner-winemaker of the tiny Le Pin estate in the Pomerol district of Bordeaux. “He sold his pictures too cheaply, and I did the same with my wines.”

To anyone familiar with the prices that the rich, silky reds of Le Pin command--top vintages with a little age begin around $1,000 per bottle--this might sound like a bad joke. But Thienpont, whose main profession is selling fine wines in his native Belgium, is serious.

Until this year, he released Le Pin onto the Bordeaux futures market at prices close to those of premier cru cha^teaux like Latour and Mouton, the region’s established elite producers. Speculators, however, repeatedly inflated the price enormously within days or weeks of release.

The pinnacle was reached last year, when some wine merchants were rumored to have bought futures of the 1995 vintage for $65 to $70 and sold them on arrival for $500 to $600, as much as the market would bear.

This year, Thienpont decided to slow the speculation, or at least reduce his profit margin, by offering the 1996 futures (wines not yet released) to merchants for $150 to $200 per bottle. (Longstanding clients got the futures at the lower price.)

This made it the most expensive wine future in Bordeaux, an extraordinary achievement considering that, unlike other top Bordeaux properties, Le Pin does not have centuries of tradition behind it. Thienpont bought the estate in 1979; until then it hardly existed in its present form.

In itself, the Le Pin price explosion is like the ‘80s boom market for Impressionist paintings or what happens to the shares of a mining company when it discovers huge new mineral deposits. As in all such developments, there is an excitement generated by the skyrocketing prices alone and by the fear that they might go even higher. However, the real story of Le Pin is even more extraordinary than the astonishing prices.

Wearing a dark blazer and pale brown trousers and the smile of a man who is familiar with the good things in life, 51-year-old Jacques Thienpont looks rather like a country squire. And in a way that is exactly what he is. But for his Flemish-speaking family, the “country” was Bordeaux in southwest France.

In 1921, his grandfather bought Vieux-Cha^teau Certan, at 34 acres one of the larger properties in the 1,850-acre Pomerol area. Today it is directed by Jacques’ cousin Alexandre, and his brother Luc runs the 64-acre Cha^teau Labegorce-Zede, one of the rising stars among the cru bourgeois properties of the Medoc area.

As a young man finishing his schooling in Belgium, Jacques was introduced to wine by his uncle, the recently deceased Gerard Thienpont. “I will never forget him giving me the 1959 Cha^teau La Lagune to taste when I was 16 years old,” he says with relish. It was the beginning of a passion for Bordeaux wines and a key experience that shaped his adult life.

Thienpont subsequently entered his uncle’s business, and it was on one of their first trips to Bordeaux that Gerard pointed out the run-down Le Pin property.

“In 1979 he told me that I should buy it,” Thienpont says. “I jokingly answered that I would if he gave me the money. In the end, I bought it with some help from both him and my father.”

What he got was just 2 1/2 acres of vines (expanded in the mid-’80s to five acres) and a simple farmhouse that bears no resemblance to the grand cha^teaux of the region. The cellars were extremely primitive; the previous owner, a Madame Laubie, had not made wine there since 1968.

“It was in quite a state when I arrived,” Thienpont says. “There was an earth floor and two old wooden vats. As soon as I could afford to, I put in a concrete floor and some stainless steel fermentation tanks.”

Today the Le Pin cellars look rather like the garage of a large private house. And when he’s there, Thienpont looks less like a country squire than an ordinary vineyard worker, dressed in jeans and rubber boots, his face glowing with pleasure as he shovels grapes into the fermentation tank.

Although grape-picking takes only one day at this tiny property, he spends a month in Bordeaux during September and October to supervise the preparations and to oversee the fermentation. Throughout the year, Thienpont returns every few months to monitor a vintage’s 18- to 24-month maturation in 60-gallon French oak barriques before bottling. The annual production averages a mere 6,000 bottles--that’s bottles, not cases--and in 1996 it was only a little more than 3,000.

“I make wines for the emotion and inspiration I get from drinking them,” he says, “and hope other people experience some of this when they drink Le Pin. It is a big pity that it has become an investment object.”

He may take comfort from the thought that it was the style and quality of the Le Pin wines, not promotion, that created the phenomenal interest in them. During the ‘80s, Thienpont made a series of magnificent wines. The ‘81, ‘82, ‘85, ‘86, ’88 and ’89 Le Pins are all among the best Pomerol wines of these vintages.

During this period, the most famous Pomerol estate, Cha^teau Petrus, produced a number of disappointing wines (it has improved greatly since the late 1980s). As more wine lovers found that the weak vintages of Petrus could not stand up to the sumptuousness of Le Pin in blind tastings, excitement about Thienpont’s wine grew rapidly.

Although Le Pin is a powerful wine with lots of tannin, it is soft enough to drink from the moment it is bottled. This means that it is precisely what many wine lovers expect from Pomerol and that it fits the contemporary international fashion for top-quality reds.

Thienpont has been accused of opportunism, of making Le Pin wines in this style to court the press and, through them, wealthy collectors. He insists that very different factors are responsible for the style of his wines.

Le Pin may be made from an almost identical blend of grapes to Cha^teau Petrus--roughly 92% Merlot and 8% Cabernet Franc--but the soil at the two properties is very different; at Le Pin it is almost entirely sand and gravel, compared to heavy clay at Petrus.

“That is why their wines are much firmer than mine,” Thienpont says. “My aim is that Le Pin should always be true to the vineyard and the vintage. Its character comes from there, not from any winemaking philosophy.”

What you can taste of Thienpont in Le Pin is his perfectionism. Neither the ’79 nor the ’80 satisfies him, because they do not live up to the standards he sets himself today. He prefers to regard 1981 as the first “real” Le Pin.

It’s still very much alive today, showing the silky texture typical of the property and dispelling the suggestion of some experts that a red Bordeaux as soft as this cannot age. (Even the 1987 Le Pin, from a vintage that was generally weak in the region, has an impressive amount of body and richness and, if well cellared, does not yet show any sign of over-maturity.)

He does not consider the 1997 vintage to be really exceptional but is still very pleased with the result. “The young wine shows lovely fruit, rather like 1985 or ‘88,” he says. The 1985 Le Pin was extremely seductive when I last tasted it two years ago, “Mmmmmmmmmmmm” being the spontaneous reaction of several at the table when they smelled its ravishing bouquet of ripe blackberries. The 1988 tasted at the same time was less charming but assertive and full of spice.

Unless you are one of the lucky few who already have the wines in your cellar, you will probably need to do battle at auction with wealthy wine collectors from around the globe to taste a great Le Pin, such as the ‘82, ’86 or ’90. Although they are monumental wines, packed with plum and all kinds of berry flavors that linger long after the wine is swallowed, they are neither loud, overbearing nor tiring to drink, as are so many of the red wines highly praised by the world’s wine press.

It epitomizes Thienpont’s approach that there was never any question of calling the property Cha^teau Le Pin, although there was no legal obstacle and it had once been known under this name.

“When I employed a graphic designer to create the label, I told him that I did not want any kind of picture on it and that he should make it simple, yet distinguished,” Thienpont says.

As much as it may startle Le Pin enthusiasts, this is probably the description of his wines that would most please Thienpont himself.