Clos L’Église: Vineyards
The domaine is located fairly high up on the plateau of Pomerol, not quite as central as Château Lafleur or Petrus (assuming we take that ‘button’ of blue clay as the ‘centre’), but it lies less than one kilometre to the west, so a good position. The château sits just off the Route de Saint Jacques de Compostelle, and as I indicated in my introduction it sits directly adjacent to Château L’Église-Clinet. Other near neighbours obviously include Château Clinet and Château Gombaude Guillot on the south side, the Clos L’Église vines running right around the former, and Château Rouget on the north side, on the more sandy slope that runs down towards the Barbanne.
Today there remain 6 hectares at Clos L’Église, the 4 hectares that Jean Rouchut and Thérèze Laval started out with having been augmented by another 2 hectares in 1978, planted by the Moreau brothers. The area currently planted to vines, to be precise, is 5.89 hectares. The soils are gravel with clay, the former perhaps dominating somewhat, certainly in those sections of the vineyard that I have walked through. There is some crasse de fer, the deeper iron deposits that characterise the Pomerol vineyard, and there are also some sandier soils as you move down the slope.
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