Château Fonbadet
The grander the commune, the fewer small estates you seem to find within it. This certainly seems to be true of several of the great communes of the left bank, such as St Julien and Pauillac. Each is blessed with a myriad cru classé estates (well, eleven and eighteen respectively, to be precise) but beyond that there are few names here to remember. There does not seem to be the wealth of cru bourgeois domaines we find in Margaux and St Estèphe.
One reason for this might be, I suppose, the grandeur of the terroir, which quite rightly is all classified as cru classé territory. That makes sense, of course, until we remember that this isn’t Burgundy; it is not the land that is classified, but the château.
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