Château Laville

The property sits in Preignac, right on the edge of the Ciron, and is one of the oldest in the commune. It was also among the first to bottle at the château itself, in the early 1900s, when the norm in Bordeaux was to sell wine in barrel to the trade and let the trade bottle it and put a name on it.

Fourteen hectares on gravel bedded in limestone. Ninety per cent sémillon and ten per cent sauvignon blanc.

The Barbe family runs it, and there is an uncommon detail here: the owner holds a doctorate, and his thesis, defended in 2000, was on noble rot itself. He has spent the years since testing in his own vineyard, harvest after harvest, what he wrote about.

The wine is aged for thirty months in new four-hundred-litre barrels.