Château Lynch-Moussas: Vineyards
The vineyards of Château Lynch-Moussas certainly feel, as I suggested in my introduction, as if they are in something of a Bordeaux backwater. I have had similarly serendipitous discoveries of other châteaux in the past; one moment I am whizzing through the trees, the waspish buzz of my hire car’s engine my only companion, and the next I realise I have just sped past a really grand château. The same thing happened with Château Citran once, as well as Château Peyrabon and the gigantic Château Rousseau de Sipian (a huge château in the Médoc that would probably look down on even Chateau Margaux such is its scale). All of them hide in the forests or peripheral wildernesses of Bordeaux. Having said that, none of them are classed growth properties.
Today the Lynch-Moussas vineyards amount to 58 hectares; most lie at the western-most edge of the commune of Pauillac, west of the Château Batailley and Château Grand-Puy-Lacoste vineyards, while some lie over the boundary (a communal boundary, not an appellation boundary) in Saint-Sauveur, just south of the château. Other plots are more distant, closer to the town of Pauillac itself. These more central vineyards are more likely to have a more favourable, gravelly terroir. Out in Saint-Sauveur, where the château is situated, the soil is dark and sandy (as pictured above, left). Here at the western edge of the Médoc’s viticultural expanse the gravel is subsumed by the sands of Les Landes which, a few million years ago, drifted lazily in from the west.
