Château Pouget

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Château Pouget

Château Pouget is a vineyard of Bordeaux . Since the classification of 1855 , the winery has been classified as Quatrième Grand Cru Classé (fourth level of classification).

The estate is located in Cantenac in the Margaux wine-growing region , with around 28 hectares it is  quite small. About 10 hectares of the total usable area are planted with vines. 60% of the area is planted with Cabernet Sauvignon , 30% with Merlot and 10% with the Cabernet Franc grape variety . The vines have an average age of 37 years and the planting density is a high and thus quality-enhancing 10,000 stocks per hectare. In the middle years, the estate produces around 50,000–60,000 bottles of red wine , including its second wine . In some of the last vintages, the difficult Cabernet Franc variety has been abandoned so that the proportion of Merlot in wine increases to 40% and makes the wine more rounded. The soil consists of a few meters thick gravel deposits of the Gironde from the Quaternary period .

The manual harvest extends over 10-25 days. The harvest traditionally begins with the early ripening Merlot and ends when the Cabernet Sauvignon has reached its optimal maturity. The mash fermentation takes place in concrete or stainless steel tanks. Depending on the vintage characteristics of the vines, fermentation lasts 8 to 35 days. As a rule, it is the young vines that are only briefly in contact with the mash and are used in the second wine of the estate (formerly Château La Tour Hassac , now Antoine Pouget ). Around 24,000 bottles are produced annually from this second wine.

After fermentation, the wines mature in oak barrels for 12 to 18 months . The barrels are renewed at 30 to 50% annually. The controlled malolactic fermentation also takes place in the barrique .

For more than 30 years we have consistently avoided artificial fertilizers and since 1997 the wines have not been filtered due to the long storage in barriques. This gives the wines more flavor.

history

Château Pouget has belonged to Etienne Monteil, canon of Saint-Émilion , since 1650 . He later left the management to his brother Martin Monteil. Martin's granddaughter, Thérèse Dorlhiac, took over the property in 1748 as the heir to François Antoine Pouget. His daughter Claire married Pierre-Antoine de Chavailles, Seigneur du Parc (parish of Mérignac ), lawyer and general secretary of the city of Bordeaux in 1771 .

The estate remained in the hands of the Pouget de Chavailles family for almost 150 years. The estate was confiscated during the French Revolution . However, the family managed to get a large part of the estate back in 1798. A small portion of the usable area was kept as Domaine National by the administration of the Gironde department .

In 1855, on the occasion of the World's Fair, Château Pouget was elected a fourth crop, a Quatrième Grand Cru. It was not until ten years later that the family converted part of the manor building facing the street into a living area. Two marble slabs were attached to the facade, on which the history of the various attempts at classification of Bordeaux is documented. As early as 1775, at the request of Dupré de Saint-Maur, the Bordeaux wine merchants created a classification for tax reasons. At the time, a barrel of wine on the estate was selling for around £ 600. Even then, traders chose a classification into five levels, and Pouget was already part of the fourth level. In 1834 an evaluation of the commercial connections of individual goods of the Départment Gironde was published, in which the property again took top places.

Since 1906 the estate has been owned by the Guillemet family, who have also owned the neighboring Château Boyd-Cantenac since 1932 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Archives Départementales de la Rue d'Aviau, à Bordeaux, evaluated by Dewey Markham Jr, in his book 1855, Histoire d'un Classement , published 1997, Éditions Féret (pp. 231 to 276).