1975 Château Domaine de L'Eglise

Château Domaine de L’Eglise is a 17-acre estate in Pomerol. It is the oldest estate in the Pomerol and dates to the 16th century. For several centuries is was run by the Hospitaliers de Saint-Jean de Jerusalem to support a local hospital that tended to lepers. In 1973 it was purchased by the Casteja family, which owns the Bordeaux wine merchant business Borie-Manoux and several Bordeaux chateaux. The estate’s vineyards are planted to 95% Merlot and 5% Cabernet Franc. About 30,000 bottles are produced annually.

Pomerol is the smallest of Bordeaux’s red wine producing regions, with only about 2,000 acres of vineyards. Located on the east side of the Dordogne River, it is one of the so-called “right bank” appellations and therefore planted primarily to Merlot. Pomerol is unique in Bordeaux in that it is the only district never to have been rated in a classification system. Some historians think Pomerol’s location on the right bank made it unattractive to Bordeaux-based wine traders, who had plenty of wine from Medoc and Graves to export to England and northern Europe. Since ranking estates was essentially a marketing ploy to help brokers sell wine, ranking an area where they did little business held no interest for them. Pomerol didn’t get much attention from the international wine community until the 1960s, when Jean-Pierre Moueix, an entrepreneurial wine merchant, started buying some of Pomerol’s best estates and exporting the wines. Today the influential Moueix family owns Pomerol’s most famous estate, Château Pétrus, along with numerous other Pomerol estates. Pomerol wines, primarily Merlot blended with small amounts of Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon, are considered softer and less tannic than left bank Bordeaux.