Château Gaudin

The name on the label is not the family's. In 1901 a certain Sieur Gaudin bequeathed four hectares of vines to the present owners' great-great-grandfather, and they kept his surname on the property in acknowledgement.

Today it is around ten hectares on the gravel rises of Saint-Lambert, within Pauillac, with vines averaging forty years. The house is run by a grandmother and her granddaughter.

It is planted with cabernet sauvignon as the majority variety, plus merlot, petit verdot, malbec and carménère.

That last one is worth pausing on. Carménère is one of the permitted red varieties of Bordeaux, but it has all but vanished from its home: by 2024 some sixty hectares remained in the whole region. It fared badly there — coulure at flowering, oidium in the damp and short yields — so after phylloxera Bordeaux replanted with cabernet and merlot, which held up better.

Chile, meanwhile, grows close to 10,800 hectares of carménère, more than 95% of everything planted worldwide. Finding it in a Pauillac vineyard is not the usual thing.

Their Cuvée Collection was created in 2000 in memory of Pierre Bibian and is aged twenty-four months in French oak.