Rediscovering the taste of wine from a producer who sells it for £30,000

Loïc Pasquet has been changing the image of Bordeaux wines for the last 20 years. He is loved by some and hated by others. He is the owner of Liber Pater, a small vineyard in Landiras, in the Graves region on the left bank of the Garonne River, minutes away from Château d’Yquem. Liber Pater is the producer of ungrafted wines that come from one of the rare sites that had miraculously escaped the ravages of phylloxera in the 1880s and which Loïc replanted with native Bordeaux varietals without American rootstock. Recently, one of Liber Pater’s vintages became the most expensive wine in the world, fetching the astronomical sum of £30,000 per bottle. This eccentric maverick who talks a mile a minute and peppers his speech with jokes and historic references with equal ease, visited Singapore last June. Julia Sherstyuk interviewed him in between his multiple meetings with local wine aficionados

Julia Sherstyuk: You have a chemical engineering degree and no formal education in winemaking. Yet, today you are producing the most expensive and talked about wine in the world. How did it all begin?