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Connaught to host £4,950 Pétrus dinner

15 September 2023 By James Evison

Mayfair hotel The Connaught will host a £4,950 dinner next month to celebrate Pétrus, the legendary French wine from Bordeaux.

According to the Evening Standard, the event for the Pomerol institution will be hosted at Helene Darroze’s three Michelin-star restaurant, with a five course menu matching food alongside vintages from 1990 to 2015.

The paper states that following canapés and “Kristal” caviar from Thousand Islets Lakes in China, which will be paired with Champagne and a white wine from Burgundy, the guests will get stuck into a sweetbread dish matched with two vintages of Pétrus from 2009 and 2015.

This will be followed by Cornish red mullet, Welsh grouse, and Basque cheeses with vintages being of a greater age as the meal progresses, from 2007 to 2000 to 1990.

The 1990 vintage especially is considered one of the best years for French winemaking, with bottles getting to six figures at auction, although all the bottles are highly esteemed by wine critics.

In recent years, Pétrus has become an increasingly famous wine amongst celebrity circles, often cited and purchased by Hollywood actors, musicians and in films as a sign of luxury. President of France, Emmanuel Macron, even served Chinese President Xi Jinping a glass in 2019 during a dinner on the French Riviera.

db‘s Bordeaux correspondent, Colin Hay, recently described the 2022 vintage as “utterly captivating and ethereal”. He said: “It is not at all the wine I imagined it would be and it is practically impossible for me to understand how a wine of such elegance, finesse, restraint and simple pure beauty could have been produced in this vintage – above all from 100 per cent Merlot on blue clay”.

Hay described it as a “triumph of wine-making and, quite simply, the best wine I have ever tasted en primeur”.

The news also comes as Pétrus won a long-running trademark infringement battle against a French wine brand which received a €1.2 million fine for “damaging the reputation” of the estate. In the long-running dispute dated back to 2010, when negociants Jérôme and Stéphane Coureau, along with their businesses CGM Vins trade and Direct Chais ecommerce, applied for a trademark for their Cotes de Bordueax wine brand ‘Coureau & Coureau Petrus Lambertini Major Burdegalensis 1208’, which they said was named after Bordeaux’ first mayor.