Château La Garde 2018

Château La Garde is a Vignobles Dourthe property in the Pessac-Léognan appellation, south of Bordeaux. Its terroir occupies one of the finest gravel mounds in the appellation. The 52-hectare vineyard, including 2 hectares of white, has a great diversity of soils, between gravelly mounds and clay-limestone soils, worked plot by plot on a micro scale to express every nuance of the terroir.

The harvest is carried out plot by plot, “made to measure”, with optical sorting. Winemaking, with very little handling, includes malolactic fermentation carried out partly in barriques. The wine is then aged on fine lees in oak barrels, 33% of them new. The 2018 vintage blends 63% Cabernet Sauvignon, 34% Merlot and 3% Petit Verdot.

This wine reveals notes of blackberry, black cherry, blackcurrant, blueberry, smoke, graphite, cedar and vanilla. The intense, complex nose of black fruit is accompanied by very subtle oaky notes. The palate, immediately broad, offers expressive fruit, depth and a smoky return typical of the great terroirs of Pessac-Léognan, carried by very fine tannins through to a long finish.

The cradle of wine culture in Western Europe, France owes its first vines to the Greeks of Phocaea, who settled around Marseille some twenty-six centuries ago, before the Romans spread viticulture along the Rhône and the Garonne and as far as Champagne. In the Middle Ages, Cistercian and Benedictine monks cleared the slopes of Burgundy and patiently mapped out the climats, laying the foundations of the notion of terroir. The 19th century brought the glory of the classifications, then the disaster of phylloxera, which wiped out the vineyards before they were rebuilt on American rootstocks; the creation of the appellations d'origine contrôlée in the 1930s then set the rules that would inspire the whole world. Today, France vies every year with Italy and Spain for first place in world production by volume and remains the ultimate benchmark of the Old World, as much for its age-worthy wines as for its winemaking models. Vineyards cover almost the entire country, from the cool north of Champagne and Alsace to the Mediterranean shores of Languedoc and Provence, by way of the oceanic climates of Bordeaux, the Loire and the South-West, continental Burgundy, the steep slopes of the northern Rhône and the high-altitude valleys of Savoie and the Jura. This mosaic of soils – limestone, schist, gravel or rounded pebbles – explains the extraordinary diversity of styles. As for grape varieties, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot dominate Bordeaux and produce structured reds, Pinot Noir is the signature of Burgundian finesse, Syrah of the depth of the Rhône, while Grenache, Gamay, Cabernet Franc and Mourvèdre cover every register, from easy-drinking wines to wines for long ageing. Among the whites, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin, Riesling and Viognier offer expressions ranging from lively and mineral to unctuous, all the way to great sweet wines. A land of benchmarks and constant discoveries, France remains the compass for wine lovers the world over.