Château Fourcas Dupré: Vineyards
When I first penned this profile I wrote that it was impossible, when driving north on the N215 as suggested in my opening paragraphs, to miss Château Fourcas Dupré. At the time that was because the château and outbuildings were clustered together so close to the road in the hamlet of Le Fourcas, and there were some ancient old cellars on the west side of the road which proudly bore the name of the estate. This remains true today, but there is little resemblance between the Fourcas-Dupré of old and the Fourcas-Dupré of the Jicquel era. In Gérard Jicquel’s own words, “we kept all the walls,” implying the basic structure of the château is unchanged. In truth, however, it has been transformed, from drab and functional to bright and gleaming.
The vineyards sit directly behind and around the château. The 47.2 hectares I described in my original profile has been expanded, and Jicquel’s team now tend 61 hectares of vines, the majority of which is planted to red varieties, but there is a small and historically relevant parcel planted to white varieties. The vineyard ascends to an altitude of 43 metres, the Médocian version of Mount Everest; very few vineyards in Bordeaux have this degree of altitude. Indeed, I have heard that some locals feel light-headed as they drive through Le Fourcas, as they head north to their jobs in the vineyards of grand châteaux (I might, by the way, have made that bit up).
The soils are more complex than they are along the edge of the Gironde, where gravel rules. Here too there is gravel, which dominates accounting for 80% of the terrain, but there are also layers of clay and limestone; this presence of limestone is typical of the Listrac-Médoc zone, and it is a principal reason for this region’s long association with white vines and wines.
