2010 Château Cap de Faugeres

Château Cap de Faugères is owned by Silvio Denz, a wine entrepreneur and businessman who also owns Peby Faugères and Faugères. He also has financial interest in several other French wine estates, as well as wine estates and vineyards in Italy and Spain. He owns Lalique, the producer of art glass. Denz bought Cap de Faugères in 2005. The estate has 125 acres of vineyards in the appellation of Castillion-Côtes de Bordeaux appellation. About 100,000 bottles are produced annually, along with 2,500 bottles of the estate’s second wine, La Mouleyre. Robert M. Parker Jr. has written that the estate is “always one of the top Côtes de Castillons.”

Bordeaux is the world’s most famous fine-wine producing region. Even non-wine drinkers recognize the names of Bordeaux’s celebrated wines, such as Margaux and Lafite-Rothschild. Located near the Atlantic coast in southwest France, the region takes its name from the seaport city of Bordeaux, a wine trading center with an outstanding site on the Garonne River and easy access to the Atlantic. Like most French wine regions, Bordeaux’s first vineyards were planted by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago, then tended by medieval monks. Aristocrats and nobility later owned the region’s best estates and today estates are owned by everyone from non-French business conglomerates to families who have been proprietors for generations. Bordeaux has nearly 280,000 acres of vineyards, 57 appellations and 10,000 wine-producing châteaux. Bordeaux is bifurcated by the Gironde Estuary into so-called “right bank” and “left bank” appellations. Bordeaux’s red wines are blends of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc and Malbec. It also makes white wines of Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle. There are several classification systems in Bordeaux. All are attempts to rank the estates based on the historic quality of the wines.