Liber Pater; a new cult wine!

Have I been asleep? It was not until my dog decided to play with my latest number of La Revue de Vin de France (“RVF”) and tore several pages that I became aware of this phenomenon, as I was sticking together a discussion about tasting Liber Pater and its second wine Denarius.

This wine has been produced since the mid-00s in the Graves sub-region at Bordeaux, quite a long way upstream of the city near Langon, from where AFAIK no outstanding reds have been sourced previously. Its producer Loïc Pasquet has an interesting philosophy which is appealing to a wine geek like me. He wants to re-create old fashioned Bordeaux in its supposed purity of pre-phylloxera days. His vines are ungrafted, densely planted and include some historical varieties, the low yielding vineyards are worked by hand and the wines are vinified in a low intervention manner. The RVF tasters complain about undigested oak flavours in the 2015 but this should have been remedied in the 2018 vintage because amphorae are now used.

There is a fly in the ointment, however, and that is price. Wine Searcher shows prices above €3000/bottle for Liber Pater and around €700 for Denarius . The production of 2018 was very low, only about 200 bottles, and it is said that people are paying around €30,000/bottle for this vintage!!! I wonder what sort of person is buying this wine. The geek appeal pitch doesn’t sound likely to attract the usual trophy hunter. Compared to this, DRC and Pétrus seem like bargains especially when their track record is taken into account.

Here is a link from Jeff Leve giving a lot more information, including tasting notes-

https://www.thewinecellarinsider.com/bo ... ber-pater/

Is anyone here familiar with Liber Pater and, better still, has tasted the wine?

[David M. Bueker]

Never heard of it.

I've read several discussions about it. Jeff Leve has a section on his site.
Apparently there was some discussion on La Passion du Vin about the truthfulness of some of owner's claims, and he fled thread.
You can say something is worth any number you want, and that it sells out. But secondary market is more transparent. One bottle of 2018 has sold at auction, and it went for under $800 (more than I'd pay, but if someone paid $30K euros a bottle, that's a real downside)
PT Barnum had it right.

PT Barnum had it right.

Absolutely.

Nevertheless near $ 800 is a serious price for any bottle. It is about 4x more than I have ever paid, though the current auction values of a handful bottles in my cellar now top that. I'll try and locate that thread on La Passion du Vin.

The vines of Liber Pater are propagated from a selection massale of the property’s own pre-phylloxera, ungrafted rootstock. Liber Pater is one of the first estates in Bordeaux to begin planting grapes that were popular in the pre-phylloxera era, Castet, Marselan, and Tarney Coulant. Those ancient varieties were added to the red blend starting with the 2015 vintage./

Marselan was bred by French ampelographer Paul Truel in 1961 at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) as part of a collaboration with the École nationale supérieure agronomique de Montpellier (ENSAM) to produce high yielding varieties with large berries of moderate quality. As Marselan could only produce small berries, the vine variety was shelved and considered not likely to be commercially released.[4]