Pom N Roll 2020

• Its graphite grip wants char and fat: beef short rib cooked over coals.
• Or a rib of beef, with potatoes roasted in the dripping.

Claire Laval and Dominique Techer have run Château Gombaude-Guillot since 1983, and in 1997 they did something almost nobody in Pomerol was doing: they had the estate certified organic. The appellation is small, expensive and conservative. Gombaude-Guillot has spent the decades since quietly showing that a family estate there can farm like a smallholding and still make serious wine.

There are eight hectares, most of them on the Pomerol plateau, where about 80 centimetres of glacial gravel sits over a band of iron-rich yellow clay. The farming is organic and biodynamic, picking and sorting are done by hand, and every fermentation starts with the vineyard's own yeasts.

The château's main wine is still raised in oak. Pom'N'Roll is where the next generation comes in. Made by their son Olivier, it is mostly Merlot, with Malbec and a little Cabernet Franc, fermented in concrete and then aged in terracotta amphorae with no wood at all. That keeps the fruit up front and the wine loose and fresh, which is rather the point of the name.

This is Pomerol without the dress code: dark plum and black fruit, soft tannins and a freshness that makes a second glass feel reasonable. Bordeaux as pleasure rather than proof.