Château Climens: Vineyards
As I have already indicated, the road through the Château Coutet estate which runs up to Château Climens has a slight incline, and the Climens vineyards in fact sit on the highest point of the Barsac appellation, although in truth the elevation is only 20 metres above sea level. Today there are 30 hectares of vines here, located in one large block, a relatively long and thin vineyard which runs in a southwest-northeast line, with the château close to the northeast tip. It is the only cru classé estate where the vineyards run this high in the appellation, all the way up to the A62 in fact. For this reason most of the neighbouring vineyards are unclassified, but Château Nairac owns a few neighbouring parcels (presumably those sold when the Climens vineyard changed hands in the 1970s) on the northwest side, and scattered around the northeast tip of the vineyard are a number of parcels belonging to Château Doisy-Daëne. Other than the sale to Château Nairac a few decades ago, and the acquisition of 1 hectare from a neighbour during the 1990s, the vineyard has not changed in centuries.
The soil underfoot has the reddish hue typical of the soils of Barsac, and includes a thin layer of clay and ferruginous sand, over deeper rocks of fissured limestone, again very typical of Barsac. Within the latter there are a multitude of ancient fossils, particularly starfish and molluscs, testament to this rock having been deposited by an ancient sea. The more superficial layers are river deposits and organic material. Unusually, the vineyard is entirely devoted to Semillon, the Lurtons having replaced what little Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle there was with this favoured variety; there are only a handful of vineyards in the entire region that are planted thus. The vineyard, which is subdivided into twenty small parcels, is planted at a density of 6,600 vines per hectare. The vines have an average age of 35 years, maintained by an active programme of replanting as required.
