A plateau of hamlets without a village centre, without a classification and without much history of glory: Pomerol was replanted after phylloxera as an obscure neighbour of Saint-Émilion, its wines sold cheaply into Belgium. The twentieth century turned it into the most sought-after farmland in France.
Eight hundred hectares of clay, gravel and iron pan — at the heart, the blue-clay buttonhole of Pétrus — make Merlot wines of velvet density no other place approaches. Production is tiny, estates are garden-sized, and demand is planetary: the economics of scarcity, written in wine.