Château La Tour Blanche
The origins of Château La Tour Blanche are somewhat mysterious. Records indicate it has been in existence since at least the 18th century, although the seigneurie of La Tour Blanche predates this by several hundred years. It was a seigneurie that rested in noble hands, as during the 17th century Jean Saint-Marc, seigneur of La Tour Blanche, was the trésorier général for Guyenne.
During the centuries that followed the land and estates came to Jean-Alphonse de Saint-Marc (died 1730), who bequeathed it to his son, Jean-François de Saint-Marc de Razeins (1691 – 1784). There is a small two-storey château on the property, now dwarfed by more recent additions to the estate, possibly inhabited by this noble family, but sadly there are no records to inform us of when this house was erected, nor who was responsible. It is only during the 19th century that the story of Château La Tour Blanche begins to really take shape, beginning with Pierre Pécherie, and then Frédéric Focke.
Focke ‘Discovers’ Noble Rot
With the Revolution the property passed into public ownership as a bien national, after which it was sold to Pierre Pécherie. He made no particular mark on the estate, and he subsequently sold it on, this time to Frédéric Focke (1768 – 1855). Focke, a négociant, bought the estate and its 20 hectares of vines from Pécherie in 1815. Focke was of German origin, and has been credited by some with being responsible for the introduction of sweet wine production to the region, naturally based on his experiences with the great sweet wines of the Rhine. This is of course an erroneous belief, as it is widely accepted by acolytes of Sauternes that the sweet benefits of botrytis were already well known by the 19th century, and examples of 18th-century Château d’Yquem – predating Focke’s miraculous ‘discovery’ by more than a hundred years – provide good evidence of this. It is, however, widely accepted that Focke planted some Riesling, alongside the Semillon, in his new vineyard.
