2008 Dourthe Essence de Dourthe

Dourthe is an historic Bordeaux company with almost 200 years of negociant and wine producing history. It was founded in 1840 by hotelier Pierre Dourthe who opened a wine merchant business to ensure quality wine for his hotel, and for the next five generations the Dourthe family expanded their wine trade business and bought Bordeaux estates. In 1998 the company’s professional managers bought Dourthe and in 2007 the Thiénot group, one of France’s largest wine conglomerates, bought a majority stake in Dourthe. Today Dourthe owns nine Bordeaux chateaux. One of its signature wines is Essence de Dourthe, which is produced from blending grapes from 35 acres of Dourthe’s best vineyards. The grapes therefore are sourced from numerous estates. Essence de Dourthe is made in very limited quantities of about 6,000 bottles annually.

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.