G d’Estournel: Vineyards
The G d’Estournel vineyards are located near Goulée (which gave the cuvée its original name of course) which is not far from Jau-Dignac-et-Loirac. This was once a small island surrounded by water, and this origin is clearly visible when viewing the land on aerial maps (linked at the end of this profile). The outcrop of higher land, blessed with gravel and dotted with vines, is easily distinguished from the silted-up low-lying land that surrounds it; this land is suitable for arable crops and pasture for grazing, but not for the vine, and is partitioned into fields. The climate is naturally cool and breezy here, as the Gironde (11 kilometres wide here, compared to ‘just’ 4 kilometres wide at Château Cos d’Estournel) lies one kilometre to the northeast, and the Atlantic Ocean is only 15 kilometres distant to the west.
In 2011 I drove up to Jau-Dignac-et-Loirac to get a feel for the environment here; it wasn’t a trip solely to look at the G d’Estournel vineyards, as I stopped off at many other notable Médoc châteaux, such as Château La Tour de By and Château Potensac. Goulée was windswept and rather desolate, the surrounding landscape quite flat and featureless. The low-lying silted-up soils are a sandy clay, the shrubbery along the roadside coarse, encrusted with gorse-like thorns, the sort of plants you usually stumble across on breezy and desolate beaches. At nearby Port de Goulée, where some of the Médoc’s man-made drainage ditches empty into the Gironde, the wind caused little sailing boats and dinghies moored here to rock and bob on the brown water, the sound of clanging bells ringing hollow in the silence. It felt as though I had wandered into a scene from a James Herbert novel; once the fog rolled in, the horror would begin.
Please log in to continue reading: