Château Liversan
During the course of many years visiting Bordeaux I have passed a lot of time behind the wheel, driving up and down the Médoc peninsula, calling in on the famous châteaux that look out across the muddy waters of the Gironde estuary. The road that strings these famous names together, christened the Route des Châteaux, is so familiar that from time to time I have to remind myself to turn off and take a different route, perhaps one more instead. It is too easy to forget that west of the famous appellations of St Estèphe, Pauillac and St Julien there is another huge swathe of vineyards, all with the Haut-Médoc appellation, many of which do not deserve to be overlooked.
One such interesting pocket of vines lies between the settlement of Saint-Saveur, to the west, and Artigues, which lies to the east, and which sits on the periphery of the Pauillac appellation. Here, shielded from surrounding vineyards and more famous names by dense pockets of woodland, we find Château Peyrabon and Château Ramage La Batisse, two well-known cru bourgeois properties. Right next to them sits a third, Château Liversan.
History
Records concerning these lands date back to the Medieval period, but the history of Château Liversan per se really only begins in the 18th century. At this time the property was in the hands of the Marquis de Latresne, a knight of the Order of Malta. Subsequently it came into the possession of Messieurs Bernet and Ducasse, who were proprietors at the time of the 1855 classification of the Médoc. Their reaction to this ranking of the Médoc’s estates was to write to the Bordeaux chamber of commerce, which was instrumental in drawing up the classification, in order to ask it be modified in their favour.
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