Château Grand-Puy-Lacoste: Vineyards
Château Grand-Puy-Lacoste is located at the western edge of the Pauillac appellation; although there are more Pauillac vineyards to the west (Château Lynch-Moussas, for example, is west and south a little), the plateau quickly falls away here (as can be seen in the image below, for which I walked out into the vines to the north of the château and looked north-north-west towards the aforementioned railway bridge and Artigues). As you move off the Grand Puy the large pebbles of handsome white gravel (seen below) are soon replaced by a much darker, finer, silty-gravelly sand. Indeed, most of the vineyards directly west, beyond the trees that sit behind the château, around Artigues, La Naude and Le Fournas, are in the Haut-Médoc appellation. Incidentally, hidden among these trees there is a small area of parkland and formally laid-out gardens long-associated with the château.
The vineyards cover 55 hectares of the Pauillac commune, the same land in the possession of the Lacoste family at the time of the 1855 classification; the estate thus has a remarkable history of family ownership, but also an unchanged single-parcel vineyard, almost unheard of on the Médoc. The vines stretch away in front of the château as far as the D206, which runs between Pauillac and Saint-Laurent-Médoc, but they do not extend across onto the Bages plateau on the other side of the road. These are the better vineyards, being on the Grand Puy plateau. The vines also run down to the south-west, towards the vineyards of Château Batailley and the aforementioned Château Lynch-Moussas, on the far side of the railway line. Here the soils and lower and darker.
