85% Merlot, 15% Cabernet Franc

Food pairings: Classic meat dishes of all kinds: beef, lamb, veal, pork, duck, game and roast chicken, whether roasted, braised or grilled. It also works with hearty fish such as tuna, mushroom dishes, pasta and soft cheeses.

Winemaking: After a mild, dry winter and a very hot spring and summer, the 2022 harvest ran from September 6 to 20, the earliest ever at Rouget. Yields were low because the berries were small, but the musts were ripe, fresh and elegant. Grapes were picked by hand in several passes into small 20 kg crates, sorted on arrival, destemmed and sorted again on a double sorting table. Each parcel is vinified separately, mostly in temperature-controlled truncated oak vats, while part of the destemmed whole berries go straight into barrel to ferment and age there for gentler extraction and softer tannins. A low-intervention approach kept the wine's brilliance, and it was aged in barrels, 30% of them new.

Vineyards and terroir: Rouget lies on the gentle slopes of the Pomerol plateau near the village and its church, close to L'Église-Clinet, Petrus and Le Gay, with further plots facing Petit Village, Le Pin and Trotanoy. The soils are gravel and clay, or clay and silica, over a subsoil of iron-rich sandstone. The vines average about 40 years old and are farmed with cover crops and ploughing; the 2022 was made from grapes in conversion to organic farming.

Family and history: Rouget appears in the Pomerol archives from 1700, when its handsome house was built for the Bayonne family; Pierre Bayonne, the last of them, was mayor of Pomerol under the First Empire. By the end of the 19th century Rouget was ranked among the top five estates of the appellation. The Labruyère family, winegrowers in Moulin-à-Vent in Beaujolais since 1850, bought Rouget in 1992. Jean-Pierre Labruyère replanted the vineyard, added plots on the high plateau in 1999 and fully restored the cellar in 2001. His son Edouard has run the estate since 2008.

In the pictures: The ivy-covered house of Château Rouget in Pomerol (photo: BigBob826, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0), and an early-1900s postcard of the Saint-Jean church of Pomerol and its great vineyards (anonymous, public domain).