The man from Bordeaux says yes

What would you expect of the man who makes the world's top red wine? Since he comes from Bordeaux, you might expect a haughty, aristocratic distance. Since he has been successful, you might expect egotism and impatience. Since he is assuredly rich, you might expect someone spoilt and decadent.

It's gratifying when expectations are confounded. Christian Moueix is a modest, thoughtful and wryly humorous pessimist who loves Japanese literature and gambling. He's also a perfect gent. I like him greatly.

The wine he makes is called Chateau Pétrus. It's a little vineyard in a part of Bordeaux called Pomerol. I've biked past it on a number of occasions. Pomerol is more or less flat, its only major landmark being its church, with a prominent spire reminding me of a finger raised to check which way the wind is blowing. Pétrus, none the less, occupies a very gentle mound of clay atop the more usual gravels of Bordeaux. The bottled record proves that Pétrus is Pomerol's plum spot. Within 10 minutes, you can be biking past other vineyards which have none of Pétrus's power and grandeur. Why? The answer lies down among the worms, the powdered minerals and the crushed stone rubble. Christian Moueix's job is not to let the vineyard down. By and large, he hasn't.

It's a strange job, this, working somewhere in an uneasy frontier zone between farming and fine art. Christian's father, the celebrated Jean-Pierre Moueix, almost single-hand-edly created the modern-day reputation of Pomerol: tiny estates making rich, Merlotbased, hedonist's Bordeaux (compare the Médoc: huge estates making fine-grained, Cabernet-based, intellectual's Bordeaux). Since the house Christian shares with his Chinese-American wife Chérise is full of striking modern art, and since he'd been up in his room in the Sanderson hotel the night before I met him reading a book about the correspondence between Kawabata and Mishima, and since his offices are decorated with Thomas Struth's enormous and calming photographs of places of worship, I wondered just how easy he felt in the farmer's role.

Very, it turns out. He studied agriculture and wine-making in France and California. "I had an authoritarian father, and I was wholly submitted to his goals. I must say I never considered doing anything else, maybe because of lack of personality. But I have no regrets."

He spent his first year at Pétrus doing "women's work" in the vineyards. "The hardest work in the vineyards is done not by men but by women, dealing with the vine itself. That year was very precious to me, because I think I got a perfect understanding of how the vine looks for its equilibrium during the year. It's such an advantage to be intimate with the vineyards. It's a big security. I have, being a pessimist, permanent doubts; but when I walk the vineyards, I have no doubts. It's like someone who is convinced that God exists. Everything can go wrong, but you still feel secure about something. I have that deep feeling of a physical relationship with the soil, and I would not exchange it for a PhD in philosophy, or even Japanese literature."

He attributes 80 per cent of Pétrus's character to its physical position on the face of the earth and 20 per cent to the fact that its fame, and the wealth it attracts, means he can afford to treat it "like a garden". He has made many experiments down the years: putting polythene between the rows to stop untimely rain sinking into the soil; putting strips of aluminium between the rows to increase the effect of sunshine on the grapes; flying a helicopter (himself) over the vineyards to dry rain-sprinkled grapes. The authorities have banned the polythene and the aluminium - rightly, Christian now thinks. The result of those experiments, of the great efforts he has made down the years, is that he now believes more strongly in the role of beatitude in the creation of wine. "You work as hard as you can, and then God, or chance, makes the difference. There is a limit to the power of man, in my approach."

He has, he says, several great gambles to make each year. The first comes in July, when he has to decide (using long-range weather forecasts, combined with a gambler's instinct) what kind of a summer Bordeaux is in for, and therefore what level of yield he should create for the vines. This was a lesson he learned in 1973, when he saw that the vines were never going to be able to ripen the crop they had set, and he cut away many grapes. It was revolutionary then; it is standard practice now. It can, though, be over-done; too small a yield in a hot and sunny year means the wines "are too concentrated and will lack the perfect equilibrium". His other great gamble concerns harvesting. He has a team of 200 pickers who can clear the vineyard in six hours. Perfect, so long as you punt on the right moment, which is never easy with Bordeaux's zany seaside Septembers.

I have talked to Christian Moueix several times about the taste of Bordeaux; he is deeply opposed to the luscious new wave. "I'm against those new technologies, which I think carry the big danger of losing the finesse, the elegance and the subtlety which, for me, make Bordeaux unique. We will also lose the easiness of drinking a great Bordeaux - as a couple, for example, you can easily drink a bottle without becoming tired. The new wines are so thick that you really have trouble in swallowing them. We are entering a competition of the muscles rather than the brain. It's a big mistake, though that does not mean that the new school will not win. I fear they will win." Toujours pessimiste.

Two things, though, lend his warning authority. One is that he has his own estate, Dominus, in the Napa valley, the home of the hunk, in wine terms. He has lived through the seductions and disappointments of power-wine. The other is that Pétrus itself is big. If there is one Bordeaux wine from the 1990s which seems to me indubitably and spectacularly durable, it is the 1998 Pétrus. It's the panther of Pomerol in that great, dark year. I've been lucky enough to taste the 1964 Pétrus twice, a wine which, even today, is still so laden with substance that you could spread it into a sandwich. Yet Pétrus is never merely big; it is relieved and informed and qualified by a flock of other notes, to which one could give various names which don't matter much. Pétrus can also disappoint the critics, when it expresses (as Moueix allows it to) summers other than the hottest and the ripest. It soars and dips with the years. This life-echoing mutability reflects a mature understanding of beauty in wine. I think we should listen.