Château Clinet

Oak and ownership at the same property

Oak meets the juice as a working decision, not a finish applied late. Ronan Laborde, Winemaker at Château Clinet in Pomerol, has led the estate since 2004, holding the work close enough that management, ownership, and cellar judgment sit in the same pair of hands. His appointment is not a decorative line in the house history. It is the frame for a long stewardship at a Bordeaux property where each season asks for another set of small decisions, and where reputation gathers by accumulation.

Laborde also carries the public discipline of Bordeaux. Earlier in his career, he served as president of Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux, a role inside the region's formal machinery, among peers for whom appellation, allocation, and vintage are never abstract. At Château Clinet, he became owner in 2010, joining responsibility for the land to responsibility for the wines. The estate works at small scale, with 11.5 hectares on Pomerol's highest plateau, and that scale matters. It keeps the conversation narrow enough for the vineyard, the cellar, and the finished bottle to remain in contact.

Merlot on the high plateau

The estate's language is Pomerol AOC, still red wine, and Merlot at the center, with Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc in the blend. The setting gives the wines their architecture: clay and gravel on the high plateau, old vines, and the La Grand Vigne parcel planted in 1934. Those facts do not need dressing. They put the work in a specific register of depth, tannin, and patience, where the method has to respect both power and line.

Laborde describes the cellar in plain terms: “We truly believe that the juice will improve by getting in contact with the oak which will improve the quality the complexity of the wines.” The sentence is useful because it names oak as an active tool. Fruit, wood, and time are not separate chapters here; they form one sequence, with oak used for structure, finish, and the slow settling of complexity. His signatures, Ronan by Clinet and Pomerol by Clinet, show the range of the house through that same discipline, one aimed at daily drinking, the other more tightly bound to the appellation name.

Quiet work among old vines

The chateau keeps a classic register: quiet rooms, a refined table of decisions, vineyards close enough to make the cellar feel accountable to the rows outside. This is not a theatrical winery. The atmosphere is formal without excess, shaped by the restraint of an old Pomerol estate and by the concentration that small parcels demand. In the tasting room, the scale remains intimate; the wine arrives with the pressure of place already in it.

What matters here is continuity at the bench of a property rather than novelty. Laborde's next movement is still the next vintage, read through Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, oak, and time. The measure remains Château Clinet's La Grand Vigne.