Château Hosanna is a small, prestigious Pomerol estate owned and managed by the Moueix family, occupying a privileged position on the finest clay and gravel soils of the Pomerol plateau adjacent to Pétrus and Lafleur. The estate was acquired by Jean-Pierre Moueix in 1999, incorporating the vineyard previously known as Certan Giraud, and replanted and managed with the same obsessive precision and minimal intervention that has always characterised the Moueix approach across their Pomerol portfolio. With only 4.5 hectares of vines, of which approximately 80% is Merlot and 20% Cabernet Franc, Hosanna produces wines in tiny quantities that are rarely seen on the open market outside the Moueix allocation network, and whose quality, in the finest vintages, rivals the very best Pomerol produced anywhere on the plateau. The terroir of Hosanna, on the Pomerol plateau’s characteristic mix of dense blue clay and rounded gravel over the crasse de fer iron-rich subsoil, provides ideal conditions for producing Merlot of exceptional concentration and mineral depth.

The 2008 Bordeaux vintage was initially assessed as a difficult and challenging year, particularly on the left bank, but the Pomerol plateau’s clay-dominant soils and the late-ripening Merlot’s particular sensitivity to the long, warm autumn produced wines of outstanding quality in the finest estates. Château Pétrus 2008 is now regarded as one of the finest wines of the decade, and Hosanna, whose position adjacent to Pétrus on the same clay plateau allows for comparison of terroir performance, should have produced a wine of exceptional quality in a vintage that proved extremely well-suited to the clay-dominant Pomerol soils. At seventeen years from harvest, the 2008 Hosanna will be approaching its optimal drinking window, with the primary fruit having given way to the complex secondary and tertiary aromas of aged Merlot-dominant Pomerol from a distinctive and mature year.

A 2008 Hosanna represents one of the finest and rarest mature Pomerol acquisitions available from this catalogue: a wine from one of the plateau’s smallest and most precisely terroir-privileged estates, from a vintage that has revealed its true character only over the decade and a half since release, at a production level so small that secondary market appearances are genuinely rare. For collectors who follow the Moueix estate portfolio with close attention and who seek mature Pomerol at the very highest quality level below Pétrus, this is a wine of outstanding relevance.

Deep ruby with mature brick highlights and a complex, evolved nose of ripe plum, black cherry, truffle, iron mineral, tobacco, cedar, dried violet and the characteristic dense clay mineral depth of the Pomerol plateau. Full-bodied with silky, mature tannins, excellent residual acidity and a very long, complex, mineral finish of considerable Pomerol authority. Best now through 2035.