2006 Château Clos L'Eglise (Cotes de Castillon)

Château Clos L’Eglise (Cotes de Castillon) is a 40-acre estate in St-Magne de Castillon. The estate is owned by Gerard Perse, a French industrailist and one-time bicycle champion who sold two supermarket chains to finance his entry into the world of winemaking. He owns several Bordeaux estates, including Château Pavie and Pavie-Decesse. After the 2008 vintage he stopped making wine under the Clos L’Eglise label and instead used the estate’s grapes as part of the blend for his new Esprit de Pavie, a second wine for Pavie. Clos L’Eglise was a blend of 70% Merlot, 15% Cabernet Franc and 15% Cabernet Sauvignon.

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.