Paul Pontallier, Who Gave New Life to a Bordeaux Estate, Dies at 59
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Version 0 of 1. Paul Pontallier, who helped restore the celebrated Bordeaux producer Château Margaux to pre-eminence and served as its passionate embodiment around the world, died on Sunday. He was 59. The estate announced his death but did not provide a cause or say where he had died. However, it was known that he had recently been battling cancer. Mr. Pontallier was just 27 in 1983, barely out of viticultural school, when he applied for a job as the technical director at Margaux, an important position for someone so inexperienced. The equally inexperienced young owner of Margaux, Corinne Mentzelopoulos, hired him. “Put it down to the natural confidence of youth,” Mr. Pontallier told wine-searcher.com last year, reflecting on the audacity of seeking such a job. “I have always been quite ambitious and wanted to work with a leading property from the outset.” Few names are more magical in the history of wine than Margaux. The chateau traces its roots to the 16th century, when the de Lestonnac family set up the 650-acre estate, 230 of the acres covered with vines, more or less as it exists today. By the 18th century, Margaux was considered one of the world’s great wines, with Thomas Jefferson and Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole of Britain among its ardent fans. In 1855, the leading Bordeaux producers were classified according to reputation, price and taste, a ranking that is still influential today. Margaux was one of four chateaus named in the top level, or first growth, along with Lafite, Latour and Haut-Brion, later to be joined by Mouton Rothschild in 1973. Despite its history and reputation, Margaux was in shambles in the 1970s. A recession and a succession of disastrous vintages had left the owners, the Ginestet family, deeply in debt, with Margaux their prize asset. In 1977, Margaux was sold to André Mentzelopoulos, a grocery store magnate. He immediately began investing heavily in the estate. When Mr. Mentzelopoulos died in 1980, his daughter Corinne, just 27, took charge. When Mr. Pontallier was hired, his background was more academic than practical. He held a doctorate from the Bordeaux Institute of Oenology, where he had studied with the renowned oenologist Émile Peynaud and written a dissertation on the barrel aging of red wines. Mr. Pontallier had also just returned from national service in Chile, most of which he had spent teaching oenology in Santiago. When he joined Margaux, restoration projects were underway, and the great 1982 vintage was propelling the region toward prosperity. Mr. Pontallier took part in efforts to replant the vineyard and improve drainage, to renovate the cellar and rethink the winemaking operation. During this time he worked again with Mr. Peynaud, who had been hired as a consultant, and he developed a symbiotic working partnership with Ms. Mentzelopoulos. In 1990 she named him managing director of Margaux, a position he held until he died. Mr. Pontallier’s academic training shaped his work at Margaux. He based each important decision on empirical observation and experiment, said Philippe Bascaules, his longtime assistant, who is now the winemaker at Inglenook in the Napa Valley of California. “What I learned from him was doubt and humility,” Mr. Bascaules said. “He said many times, ‘If you don’t doubt, you don’t learn.’ Doubt was the beginning of research.” Humility, Mr. Bascaules said, came in recognizing that at Margaux, the place — what Mr. Pontallier once referred to as “the dictatorship of great terroir” — was more important than human activity, and should be given the utmost respect. How did Mr. Pontallier and his team decide which young wines would go into Margaux, and which would not make the cut and would instead be used for the estate’s second label, Pavillon Rouge? “We taste,” he said in 1995. “We taste, we taste, we taste.” Fashions in wine came and went during his tenure. In the 1990s, Mr. Pontallier experimented with new technologies, like reverse osmosis and micro-oxygenation, but ultimately rejected them. Many producers in Bordeaux strove to make their wines more concentrated and powerful, but for Mr. Pontallier, elegance and balance were the hallmarks of Margaux. Indeed, the best vintages of Château Margaux display freshness, grace, vibrancy and a sort of intensity without weight. When young, they smelled of spicy red fruit, violets and herbs. As they aged they developed perfumed aromas of graphite, tobacco and cedar, and like all the best Bordeaux they improved for decades. A 1961 Margaux, tasted in 2013, was lovely, graceful and harmonious. Outside of Margaux, Mr. Pontallier consulted at wine projects in France, in Chile and on the North Fork of Long Island, where for a decade beginning in 1997 he advised the winemaker at Raphael, Richard Olsen-Harbich, on farming and winemaking. Paul Pontallier was born on April 22, 1956, in Bordeaux, and grew up not far from the city, where his parents grew grapes and made wine at Château la Loge Saint-Léger. It was not particularly profitable, Mr. Pontallier later recalled, and his father would have preferred that he take up another profession. But he had a passion for farming and studied agronomy, viticulture and oenology, first in Paris, then in Montpellier and later in Bordeaux. His survivors include his wife, Béatrice, and four children, Guillaume, Thibault (who also works for Margaux), Alice and Antoine. In recent years Mr. Pontallier spent much of his time as a traveling ambassador, spreading his passion for Margaux throughout the world, especially in Asia, which since the turn of the century has rapidly grown as a market for fine French wines. He also oversaw the construction of a new cellar and winemaking facility, designed by Norman Foster. In person, Mr. Pontallier was very much like Margaux wines, gracious and elegant. He enjoyed reading about history and liked to drink good Burgundy and sherry. But when asked recently what he would prefer for his last meal, he said the food did not matter, as long as it came with several bottles of Château Margaux. |