Château Lamothe
Château Lamothe looks down upon the nearby road from an elevated position on a gently sloping plateau just outside the village of Sauternes. Indeed, it is easily visible in the distance as soon as you emerge from the village, the château a broad and low-slung building dating from the 16th century, with prominent rounded towers at each corner wearing rather Romanesque roofs. I often think its whitewashed walls and towers to be somehow incongruous, as if this castillo blanco has been transplanted here from somewhere further south. La Mancha, perhaps?
But this is certainly not the case; Château Lamothe, which is half of this gleaming white pseudo-fortress, is very much part of France, and part of Sauternes. The other half is its conjoined twin, known today as Château Lamothe-Guignard (having been previously named Lamothe-Bergey after another owner). The split which resulted in the original Lamothe estate (which was also referred to as Château Lamothe-d’Assault when it was whole) being divided into these two separate and independently owned properties occurred during the 19th century. Before this time little information on the estate’s history is available, but that is where we start.
The Origins of Lamothe
The origins of Château Lamothe are, as I have indicated above, are intimately intertwined with that of Château Lamothe-Guignard. Indeed, the two have a shared history right up until the 19th century. In the very beginning the land was occupied by a Mérovingien fortress probably constructed during the 8th century, built on this crop of high land to protect the locals from troublesome outlaws who inhabited the nearby woods and who had a penchant for ransacking nearby properties.
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