Château Margaux: Wines
The process of harvest and vinification here sees, as you might expect, no expense spared. From the moment the fruit is picked, by hand, into small cagettes, to the final steps of the vinifications in the cellars designed by Norman Foster, the grapes, juice and wine are carefully cosseted.
Looking to the reds first, these arrive at the harvest reception area outside the vinification facilities, where you would imagine the grapes undergo the most rigorous of sortings. The late Paul Pontallier, whose eagerness to experiment led him to create a research and development team at the property, naturally trialled optical sorting when the machines first went mainstream, around 2009 and 2010. He was not hugely impressed with the results though, and today the sorting here remains traditional, achieved mostly in the vineyard at picking.
The grapes are destemmed of course (although this is another area where Paul experimented) and then lifted to the highest level to be fed into the cuves by gravity. Although I was struck by the long rows of huge wooden vats which I saw during my first visit to Château Margaux (pictured on several earlier pages of this profile) the vinifications are today conducted in smaller stainless steel vats in the new facility. The wooden vats are still in use, although they are gradually being replaced by smaller wooden vessels; this gives the same magical atmosphere to the cellars, while allowing for greater precision in the work. Some fermentations can be done in very small 25-hectolitre cuves, a size which facilitates plot-by-plot working, or even the vinification of small sections within individual parcels.
