Wine opinion: Pessac chateaux show wines are worth the wait

Wine, as we all know, is about playing the long game. Returns on investments if you buy a vineyard are usually talked about in terms of decades - not dissimilar to the amount of time you have to wait for an expensive bottle of red Bordeaux to reach its peak.

So it's fair to say that if you're a wine lover, you have to cultivate the art of patience.

But even taking that into account, the waiting game for Pessac has been longer than most. The patience of chateaux owners in this region - just to the south of Bordeaux city, with many of its vineyards touching city limits, some even surrounded by tram lines, restaurants and busy streets - has been tested for 200 years.

This was the area that, from the 1400s to the mid-1800s, was seen as producing the best wine of Bordeaux. Pessac, and the wider region of Graves, was one of the very few areas to be name-checked separately from Bordeaux itself, long before any chateaux were asked for by name.

Then along came the draining of the Médoc marshland, revealing enticingly stony soil beneath, and the arrival of hordes of Parisian bankers and powerful political families who got busy planting vines and ensuring that the notoriety of their new estates in places such as Margaux and Pauillac grew at home and abroad.

Pretty soon it was either the Médoc, or the Right Bank vineyards of Saint Emilion and Pomerol, that saw the acclaim. Graves has been playing catch-up ever since (with the clear exception of Chateau Haut-Brion, but that's a First Growth and so escapes the usual rules).