Château Giscours: Tasting & Drinking
I have something of a soft spot for Château Giscours and its wines, that long-forgotten vintage having been the first bottle of classed growth Bordeaux I ever set eyes on, or indeed purchased. Nevertheless I have no sentimentality when it comes to tasting and rating its wines, and whereas I have heaped praise (and purchased) some recent vintages, in particular 2000, 2009 and 2010, while 2015 and 2016 also have certain merit, i have also found some other vintages, such as 2011, less inspiring. My visit to the estate in 2018 was a chance to reassess some recent vintages, including 2011, which I admit is turning out better than my early impressions of it suggested.
Looking back to older vintages, the five consecutive vintages from 2001 to 2005 were strong; certainly none really disappointed. Obviously some are superior to others, with the 2005 and 2003 showing best recently (although I thought the 2002 very good too – in many cases this was an under-rated vintage, and often fairly priced, although all but the best wines are on the slide now).
Coming to more recent vintages, however, these are of extremely high quality. Does this reflect the more precise work undertaken in harvesting young, middle-aged and older vines separately? Perhaps, but more likely it reflects all the efforts of the team here over many years, which have been considerable. The quality hit me like a speeding train in Covid-times. The primeurs were cancelled and I sat at home, twiddling my thumbs…until the samples started rolling in. The 2019 from Château Giscours was a stunner, with a quality quite unlike any I hand previously encountered here. And then came 2020, which was astonishing. Margaux was no longer about the usual suspects; Giscours had arrived. The 2022 was similarly fabulous, the 2023 top-notch, and the 2021 a good effort for this more challenging vintage.
Whatever your choice of vintage, it seems to me that quality here at Château Giscours is generally on the up, and it is among a large number of châteaux in the Margaux appellation one of the few that can be recommended for purchase with some regularity, alongside the appellation leaders cited on the first page of this profile. For this success, Albada Jelgersma family, Alexander van Beek and Didier Fôret – and all their vintner colleagues – deserve appropriate credit. (11/7/06, updated 13/3/19, 12/5/24)
