B-Winemaker: Tour Carnet grape varieties

One of the oldest properties in the Médoc, La Tour Carnet’s beautiful medieval tower houses the treasures of troubadours, the spirit of Michel de Montaigne and La Boétie… and a majestic suite decorated in keeping with the château’s history.
The château has enormous character and contemplates its 900 years of history in the water of the surrounding moat, only crossed by an elegant drawbridge. Whether tasting the wine – a classified growth from the Haut Médoc appellation – or celebrating an annual literary prize, Château La Tour Carnet captivates both writers and fine wine enthusiasts.

The terroir of Château La Tour Carnet is a mosaic of multi diversity land. The use of the most modern techniques such as drone acquired by Bernard Magrez to analyze the plots, has optimized the virtues of this land by assigning the most suitable varieties: the hill is a soil conducive to Merlots, hillsides rather the Cabernets.

But obtaining exceptional grapes would be nothing without careful winemaking techniques to make the best of it. This is why, for several years, Château La Tour Carnet returned to traditional methods that rely heavily on manual labor.

It is a patchwork of soils composed, in the far west, of sand and gravel, becoming siliceous-gravel, siliceous-clay and calcareous-clay toward the west and center. To the east are the gravel slopes of the finest vineyards, including La Tour Carnet. Here, the soil is mainly composed of graves (fluvial pebbles, gravel and sand) from the Gunzian glacial era and is very similar to the neighboring appellations of Pauillac and Saint-Julien.
With its south-southwest exposure, a large part of the calcareous clay subsoil slopes are covered in a thick layer of Garonne River and Pyrenean graves. On this broad border of gravel slopes are located the finest vineyards. The 1855 classification confirmed this reality, and especially distinguished the Château La Tour Carnet. In the western part of the estate is ridge of asteriated limestone with Sannois clay slopes. This is the “Butte de La Tour Carnet” a geological curiosity that still leaves experts in wonder. The eastern part stretches across the south-southwest facing slopes of a gravelly hill typical of Médoc's grands crus. The calcareous clay subsoil is covered with a thick layer of Garonne and Pyrenees graves. The final part in the north consists of a large plateau of fine graves.
Years of painstaking experimentation have enabled us to get the very best from these soils by planting them with the most-suitable grape varieties—the Butte is most suitable for Merlots, while the slopes are best suited to Cabernets.

For the winemaking, any plant debris likely to bring a “grassy” flavor is thus removed to focus on the roundness characteristic of Château La Tour Carnet's wine. The flow of the grapes by gravity, the use of oak vats and hand-plunging that we do are a return to the traditional methods used in the Médoc region in the past. The aim of these techniques is to obtain a complex, silky wine, with powerful balanced tannins and great aromatic persistence.
Barrels hold the new vintage and are gathered together in the impressive amphitheater-shaped cellars of the Château La Tour Carnet.
Grand Vins are matured in barrels for 18 months. A month before bottling, the wine is returned to vats to round it off and then is blended, the final step that will reveal Château La Tour Carnet's vintage.