A heritage of old vines
Their exact age is unknown. They may have been planted after the devastating frosts of 1956 that decimated the Bordeaux vineyards. But without knowing their precise planting date, their gnarled trunks speak for themselves…
Old vines have nothing but advantages: naturally controlled yields, deep root systems that resist summer drought and draw minerals from lower soil layers, smaller grapes that are more concentrated and less susceptible to disease.
These are massal selections — grown from plants that previous winemakers had empirically identified as producing the best juice. This means genuine genetic diversity, far removed from clonal selection where a single individual is replicated thousands of times, impoverishing the genetic heritage of the varietal.
