Château Rieussec

In the eighteenth century the estate belonged to the Carmelite monks of Langon. With the French Revolution it was confiscated and sold as national property, which is how many religious holdings in Bordeaux passed into private hands.

In 1855 it entered as a Premier Cru Classé in the classification drawn up for the Paris Universal Exhibition: that list was not born as a judgement on the wine, but as a catalogue to show Bordeaux to the world.

In 1984 it was bought by Domaines Barons de Rothschild, the Lafite family. The estate then had one hundred and ten hectares, sixty-eight of them planted with vines.

Today there are eighty-five hectares of vineyard on sandy and clay gravel soils: seventeen more than at the time of the handover.