LILIAN LADOUYS 2020

Château Lilian Ladouys

History of the Château

<b>A Story Spanning Five Centuries</b>

Château Lilian-Ladouys is one of those estates that has a history spanning several centuries. Indeed, the property has gradually been built up since the 16th century. This château has seen its glorious days, notably for being owned by the Barre family for a century and a half from the 18th century. During its most prosperous years, the wines of Château Ladouys were cited among the best Saint-Estèphes in the 1st edition of Cocks and Féret, signed by Charles Cocks and now classified among rare books.

Currently, the forty-eight hectare vineyard surrounds the château in a sea of vines. The château's two towers date back to its prosperous period. Another happy era was its classification as a superior bourgeois vintage in 1932, a title renewed in 2003.

The wine-loving entrepreneur Christian Thiéblot and his wife Lilian breathed new life into the château in the 1980s. Unfortunately, they abandoned the venture nine years later. The bank Natexis then became the owner, and it was the winemaker Georges Pauli who took over the reins. Jacky Lorenzetti, founder of the real estate company Foncia, wanted to develop a wine hub in Bordeaux. He purchased it in 2008 and entrusted the technical management to Vincent Bache-Gabrielsen, an agronomist and oenologist. The lands were then consolidated, and a brand-new wine storehouse was built.

Located south of the Saint-Estèphe appellation, not far from Cos d'Estournel, the vineyard extends over a large number of plots with varied soils. The complexity of the wines comes from these gravelly (61%), clay-limestone (23%) and sandy-gravelly (16%) soils. In the Bordeaux tradition, 60% cabernet sauvignon, 35% merlot, and 5% cabernet franc are cultivated here. With forty-year-old vines, the planting density is between 8,500 and 10,000 vines per hectare.