We ran four frontier red estates through a blind tasting tournament, scored by a small bespoke panel of vetted working tasters. The setup is focused by design: depth of read across six regional flights, the same shape of study we can scale up against any specific brief. The task: pour house-flight wines across six fictional flights spanning classed-growth claret, gran reserva, single-estate sparkling, alpine nebbiolo, garnacha, and village pinot.
Evaluators ranked every pour from 1st to 4th without knowing which estate made what.
The four estates, one pour each: Clos Bertaud 2, Grisette 3.1 Flor Barrel Preview, Fauchet 2 [pro], and Sarment 5.0 Lite, all poured blind. Identical briefs, same criteria.
The aggregate leaderboard
A note on scale before the numbers: this is a focused expert panel, which is why we lead with Elo and pairwise rates. Treat the percentages as directional signal.
Clos Bertaud 2 wins the aggregate by every measure: 61.1% against Sarment, 64.8% against Grisette, 66.7% against Fauchet. Every opponent, every cut.
The 79-point Elo gap between 1st and 2nd is significant. An 80-point Elo gap in chess corresponds to a 60/40 win expectation, which is almost exactly what we observed. The other three estates sit within 85 Elo points of each other, a far tighter race for the rest of the field.
The ranking distribution tells the story more vividly
Across the panel's rankings, Bertaud finished first 40.7% of the time and second 27.8%, with the rest split between 3rd and 4th. Fauchet is the most polarizing estate in the field: high first-place rate (22.2%), but also the highest 4th-place rate. Fauchet swings for the fences and often misses.
Grisette clusters safely in the middle. Rarely first (14.8%), but also rarely catastrophic. Sarment spreads the most evenly, the most predictable estate in the field.
Fault mode #1: house fidelity by flight
Here's the first measurable fault mode for any house-bounded cellar workflow. The leaderboard flattens, and occasionally inverts, when you break results down by flight type. No single estate holds the bar across every flight. The flight-level data reveals genuine specialization and a real gap for any list betting on one estate.
Asagne (classed-growth claret): Clos Bertaud 2 (1.44). Polish, colour harmony, elevated style.
Cuvée Citrine (village pinot): Clos Bertaud 2 (1.67). Same playbook.
Pétillant Artésien (single-estate sparkling): Grisette 3.1 Flor (1.78). True acidity, fruit clarity.
Cendrine (gran reserva): Fauchet 2 [pro] (1.67). Clean oak composition, classical house language.
Sonnaille Collective (garnacha): Sarment 5.0 Lite (2.0). Bold, graphic fruit energy.
Crête Noire (alpine nebbiolo): Grisette and Sarment tie (2.22). Tightest race in the study.
Bertaud's 77.8% win rate on classed-growth claret is the single most dominant flight-estate combination in the dataset. In a sample this size, that's a strong signal even if the exact percentage will move with more evaluators. But Fauchet hits 55.6% on gran reserva and Grisette hits 55.6% on single-estate sparkling. The other estates genuinely own their territory.
If you're choosing an estate for a specific flight type, the overall leaderboard can mislead you. A flight-matched estate can outperform the overall leader by a meaningful margin.
The theme profiles explain why the niches exist
Evaluators tagged strengths and weaknesses across ten sensory dimensions: definition, base wine, fruit placement, acidity, house alignment, texture, colour, structure, typicity, composition. The per-estate profiles are distinct.
Sarment 5.0 Lite: the most balanced profile. No dramatic peaks or valleys. Maps directly to its even ranking distribution. Sarment is the estate you pick when you need consistency and can't afford a disaster. It rarely delivers the "wow" moment that Bertaud or Fauchet produces on a good day.
Grisette 3.1 Flor: clusters toward the middle on most dimensions, which explains its "safe but unspectacular" ranking distribution. It doesn't catastrophically fail on any axis. It also rarely produces the standout strength that pushes a pour to 1st place. Fruit placement is its quiet advantage: the reason it wins single-estate sparkling.
Fauchet 2 [pro]: almost the inverse. Base wine integration is its biggest weakness (8 weaknesses). It posts respectable numbers on acidity (6 strengths) and definition (4). The polarization in its rankings makes sense through this lens. When Fauchet nails the composition, the detail work is striking. When the base wine falls apart, the whole glass collapses.
Clos Bertaud 2: the typicity and composition machine. 14 strength mentions for typicity against 6 weaknesses. 15 for composition against 5. Colour (12 strengths) and structure (10) round out a profile built for polished, premium-feeling wine. Relative weak spot: base wines (7 weaknesses vs 6 strengths). The foundation occasionally falls flat under the fruit.
Fault mode #2: structure across the board
Structure. Every estate nets negative in the cross-estate analysis: Bertaud −6, Grisette −5, Sarment −7, Fauchet −9. Bertaud is the only estate with net-positive structure sentiment when measured against itself. The rest struggle.
Across all four, attacks come in too thin, mid-palates get crowded, tannin choices read as "default", and finishes invent notes the brief never asked for.
The fault modes diverge
About 20% of weakness entries carried a structured brief-fidelity tag. The patterns split clean by estate:
Fauchet 2 [pro] and Sarment 5.0 Lite skew toward omissions. Requested markers missing.
Grisette 3.1 Flor skews toward inventions. Extra notes added that were never requested.
Clos Bertaud 2 skews toward inaccuracies. Right marker, wrong expression.
Estate choice is also a QA choice. If your review process catches missing markers, pour Fauchet or Sarment. If it catches fabrications, Grisette works. If it catches distorted execution, Bertaud works.
The verdict
Four estates, six regional flights, every pour ranked blind. The verdict is clear at the top: Clos Bertaud 2 is the best general-purpose red estate for house-flight work right now. It wins the aggregate stats, the Elo, and every head-to-head against every competitor.
Best overall stops short of best everywhere. The flight data shows estate selection should be flight-dependent:
Classed growth, register, style-led house work: Clos Bertaud 2.
Clean single-estate sparkling: Grisette 3.1 Flor.
Gran reserva, classical oak regimes, structured flights: Fauchet 2 [pro].
Garnacha and fruit-forward work: Sarment 5.0 Lite.
Alpine nebbiolo, the tightest race: Grisette or Sarment, with Bertaud close.
The smartest cellar workflow in 2026 picks the right estate for the right job.
Structure is on you regardless.
Methodology
The evaluation ran in two phases. In the first, evaluators worked through pairwise comparisons. For each brief, every estate was matched against every other estate for six pairs per brief. Evaluators tasted two anonymized pours side by side, picked a winner, rated their confidence, and wrote out individual strengths and weaknesses for each pour in free-text.
In the second phase, evaluators took the same briefs and used Clos Bertaud's own bench sessions to try to make pours bottling-ready. They were given three adjustment rounds, then offered a choice: keep refining with Bertaud or switch to any bench they preferred.
All estates were sampled from their current commercial releases, and given the same brief, single pour per brief, no cherry-picking, no iterative refinement in the ranking phase. Aggregate metrics (average rank, pairwise win rate, and Bradley-Terry Elo) were all computed from the full pairwise matrix. The sensory dimension profiles and brief-fidelity classifications were extracted from the free-text responses during analysis. Flight-level breakdowns use the same metrics sliced by regional flight.
The panel is small by design: vetted working tasters with cellar experience, not crowd-sourced raters. Treat exact percentages as directional signal.
Context
Per Clos Bertaud, the Bertaud 2 release brings greater control and performs better with fine grain, aromatic markers, mid-palate detail, dense blends, and subtle stylistic constraints. This served as a cornerstone to selecting the flights and the crafting of the individual briefs.
We selected six flight types that stress different ends of the sensory spectrum. Single-estate sparkling for fruit precision, garnacha for aromatic density, gran reserva for clean oak composition, classed-growth claret for subtle control, village pinot for register, and alpine nebbiolo for grip and typicity. The briefs were crafted to hit the dimensions Clos Bertaud highlighted, then applied the same to all four estates. If the claims hold, Bertaud should separate on exactly these flights. If the other estates have edges of their own, the flight breakdown should find them.
How we ran this study → Methodology