A suave and dashing Pomerol

published 23 November 2012

2010 Fleur de Clinet, Pomerol, Bordeaux, France (£225 per case of 12 (equates to £24.78 per bottle including duty and VAT), Bordeaux Index, 020-7269 0703, www.bordeauxindex.com).

My eternal quest for serious, but affordable, red Bordeaux occupies far too much of my time and it yields far too few results. That said, when my guard is down and I least expect it, a wine comes along that impresses me so much I reach for my MoneyWeek notebook immediately.

Gareth Birchley, at Bordeaux Index, is one of the wine trade's most charismatic young chaps and he spotted this beauty and sent it over to me. Clinet garnered one of my highest scores in the 2010 vintage and this second wine is already approachable and thrilling on the palate. It also displays some of the unmistakable majesty and grandeur of its parent wine.

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Top Pomerols always strike me as being too dear and there are seemingly no exceptions to this. Super-second wines are usually lacklustre and clumsy, but Fleur de Clinet is suave and dashing. Made from 95% merlot and 5% cabernet franc, this wine is a model of Right Bank purity. For the same price you can also order a case of six magnums or 24 halves I can feel an order coming on.

Matthew Jukes is a winner of the International Wine & Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year (www.matthewjukes.com).

Matthew Jukes has worked in the UK wine business for well over three decades and during this time has written 14 wine books.

Matthew regularly lectures, judges, speaks at wine conferences and runs masterclass tastings for both corporate and private clients all over the world. Matthew is also the creator of his ground-breaking initiative, the One Day Wine School, an indulgent day of tasting and learning first performed in 2006.

He has been the MoneyWeek wine correspondent since 2006 and has written a weekly column for the Daily Mail’s Weekend Magazine since 1999. His four highly-acclaimed, annual wine reports – the Burgundy En Primeur Report, the Bordeaux En Primeur Report, the Piemonte Report and the 100 Best Australian Wines – are published on his website, www.matthewjukes.com.

Matthew is one of the world’s leading experts on Australian wine and, with Brisbane-based wine writer Tyson Stelzer, runs an annual competition in Australia to find ‘The Great Australian Red’. He was made Honorary Australian of the Year in the UK at the 2012 Australia Day Foundation Gala dinner.

Matthew is a winner of the International Wine and Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year Trophy. His thoughts, recommendations and tastings notes are followed very closely by the wine world at large.