2016 Chateau Moulin Haut-Villars Fronsac Bordeaux

Fronsac sits on the Right Bank about four miles from Pomerol — hillier, cooler, and far enough off the tourist map that the prices never caught up to the quality. Same corner of Bordeaux, same 2016 harvest, a fraction of the price tag.

And 2016 was a monster year here. James Suckling handed out eight perfect 100-point scores across the vintage; the Wine Advocate gave nine more. Those went to first growths and famous names at famous prices. This came off the same vintage, a few miles down the road.

What's in the bottle: mostly Merlot off 9.65 hectares of clay-limestone and clay-silt, hillside fruit overlooking the valley of the Isle. Aged entirely in used barrels — no new oak anywhere near it — so what you taste is the place rather than the cooperage. Blackberry and plum up front, tobacco and dark chocolate underneath, tannins that ten years in bottle have already softened.

That last part matters. Bordeaux with this much age is usually priced for collectors, because somebody paid to sit on it for a decade. Here, somebody else did the waiting. Pull the cork and drink it.

Château Villars sits in Saillans, in the northeast corner of Fronsac, on hillsides above the valley of the Isle. The Gaudrie family has been here for seven generations — documents place them on the land back to the French Revolution and the First Empire.

Their forefather Octave Trocard built the estate up at the turn of the last century and took a gold medal at the 1907 World's Fair in Antwerp. He died in the Great War at thirty-eight, leaving two orphaned daughters. Thérèse married Jean-Jacques Gaudrie in 1934, and he spent the postwar years replanting what the war had cost them. Their son Jean-Claude took over in 1968, won gold at the Paris Concours Général in 1973, and in 1978 bought the estate's first new oak barrels — aging Fronsac the way the classified growths did, which almost nobody in the appellation was doing at the time.

Thierry Gaudrie, a trained oenologist, came home in 1991 after consulting in the Blaye and has run the estate since 1997. Today it covers 29.65 hectares of vines, with 9.65 of those reserved exclusively for Château Moulin Haut-Villars.