Figeac is now like 3x what it cost or so and seems to be selling; my guess is they’re happy w the changes.
Those changes are also far beyond the wine… these guys often times are brought in for hype/distribution strategies as well, it’s not always that they go in and tweak the wine.
Often they are brought in just to annoy Robert.
Which one (Conseillante or Figeac) did you buy?
Figeac was really stung by being left behind in the St-Emilion reclassification which was maybe not just about Parker points. When you open this kind of can of worms you inevitably get a bidding war which biases the outcome to those with the deepest pockets. But for Figeac I suspect that no amount of spondulicks would secure the prize given the Parker point deficit. So that’s why D’Aramon got his marching orders and Rolland was called in. Desperate times, desperate measures. The Figeac PR machine went to great lengths to get the message across that Rolland was only a fringe player and that Frederic Faye called the shots. They are really touchy about that given the value they place of the Manancourt heritage. If you take that at face value it really seems to have worked even though D’Aramon’s last vintage the 2011 was a belter. Bit of a collector’s item that. Btw the 2009 and 2010 are messed up in my opinion. I tasted the 2016 next to the 2010 a month ago and they were eons apart. While the 2010 was all over the place, the sixteen had an alluring precision and edginess that you don’t get in Rollandised wines. As a side note I am beginning to worry that Rolland was a bit too influential at Pontet Canet in some recent vintages like 2012. Alfred Tesseron reckons Rolland’s gift is knowing when to pick, but some of the fruit in these wines could be construed as being a tad over-ripe? Back to our right bank neighbours, much as I am a huge admirer of her predecessor Jean-Michel Laporte, Marielle Cazeaux fashioned a sixteen that in my opinion is even better than Figeac in the same year, and the best young La Conseillante I have tried since the 1990. No idea how much influence Rolland had. I am guessing not very much, given this wine’s levitating quality. Seems like Rolland is a big consultancy and well-oiled machine, but like Robert Parker, born the same year, has a finite influence and the tide is already definitively shifting to dialling back on alcohol, extract, ripeness, etc. Such exciting times and a brave new world beckons for the post-Parker/Rolland era. Wish I was a lot younger because I suspect we will get a lot more vintages like the 2016.