Château Giscours
The Château Giscours is one of the famous wineries of Bordeaux . Since the classification of 1855 the winery has been classified as Troisieme Grand Cru Classé , the third highest level of the classifications.
The estate is located in the Margaux wine-growing region , southwest of the village of Labarde.
The wine from Giscours is quite well known, as the estate is large with around 80.5 hectares of vineyards. 53 percent of the area is planted with Cabernet Sauvignon and 42 percent with Merlot . The remaining 5 percent is divided between the Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot varieties . The planting density is a high 10,000 vines per hectare and almost a quarter of the vines are older than 40 years. The good itself is far greater; it covers nearly 400 hectares of land. In the middle years the estate produces around 300,000 bottles of wine. Among the younger vintages, the wine from 2000 particularly stood out, with 92 Parker points .
After fermentation on the skins, the wines mature in barriques for about 18 months . Malolactic fermentation has been carried out in wooden barrels since the early 1990s .
The second wine from Château Giscours is called La Sirène de Giscours .
History of the winery
The first mention of Château Giscours goes back to around 1330. The documents speak of a fortified donjon . On November 19, 1552 the property changed hands for £ 1,000; The sale documents show that at that time Château Giscours was growing wine. The seller was Gabriel Giraud; Pierre L'Homme appeared as the new owner. It is also known that the Sun King Louis XIV valued the estate's wine.
In 1789, the year of the French Revolution , Château Giscours belonged to the Saint-Simon family. The family's property was confiscated and declared common property (“ Bien National ”).
After a long line of owners such as B. Michel Jacob bought the property from the Parisian banker Comte de Pescatore and built the château that still exists today in 1847. The Comte's aim was to receive Eugénie de Montijo there.
On the occasion of the world exhibition in 1855, Château Giscours was classified as a Troisième Grand Cru Classé .
In the period that followed, the entire wine-growing region of Bordeaux plunged into a deep crisis. The trigger was the phylloxera infestation and the occurrence of the fungal diseases real powdery mildew and downy mildew of the grapevine introduced from North America . Château Giscours was not spared either. A time followed in which the estate changed hands several times. However, no one succeeded in leading the winery out of its deep crisis.
In 1952, the Tari family, who had made a considerable fortune with viticulture in Algeria ( viticulture in Algeria ), took over the château. Nicolas Tari first invested in the structure of the main building and had an artificial lake built. This lake should have a lasting effect on the microclimate . After these investments he turned to the new planting of the vineyards and renovated the wine cellar. In addition, Tari lived big and financed a polo team. In 1970 Pierre Tari, the son of Nicolas, took over the management of the house. In 1976, Pierre Tari was a member of the Paris Wine Jury .
He continued his father's quality efforts, but had to pay tribute to the high investments and high standard of living in the early 1990s and sell the estate. The buyer was the Dutch businessman Eric Albada-Jelgersma, who also owns Château du Tertre .
Jelgersma's debut was not without controversy. In a series of legal disputes, he first sued the Tari family because the terms of sale in 1990 were obviously not clear. The Tari family claimed that Albada Jelgersma had only acquired the vineyards and the cellar, but that the buildings were still owned by the Taris. In addition, Tari is said to have improperly enriched himself with company capital prior to the sale.
In 1998, the Giscours scandal was finally exposed. Especially in the vintages are 1995 and 1996 illegal winegrowing practices such as unauthorized sugar to the Mostss have been unfair and the use of oak chips out of the house Demptos used in the expansion. Even if it later turned out that the second wine in particular was affected by the illegal practices, the damage was considerable.
Jelgersma, who was obviously unaware of the Giscours operations, replaced a large part of the team including the well-known oenologist Jean-Michel Ferrandez on site. Today the Dutchman Alexander van Beek ran the business both at Giscours and at the neighboring Château du Tertre . Van Beek's wife Véronique Sanders heads the day-to-day business at Château Haut-Bailly in Pessac-Léognan .
literature
- Charles Cocks, Edouard Féret, Bruno Boidron: Bordeaux et ses vins . 18th edition. Èdition Féret et Fils, Bordeaux 2007, ISBN 978-2-35156-013-6 .
- Horst Dippel : The wine lexicon . 3. Edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13826-4 .
- Robert Parker : Parker's Wine Guide (= Collection Rolf Heyne ). Heyne, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-453-16305-2 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alexander Van Beek (Château Giscours): pour s'intégrer, il a fallu faire ses preuves . In: Le Journal du Net , 2007.
- ↑ Tromperie sur un grand cru classé . In: L'Humanité , June 3, 1998.