Chateau Giscours 2005
- Vintage
- 2005
- Country
- France
- Region
- Bordeaux,Margaux
- Size
- 750ml
- Rating
- WE95, JS95, WS93, WA92
- Grape
- Bordeaux Blend
This chateau gets better and better. The wine has power, but it is harnessed by the intense fruits, the blackberry flavors, the density and the wood. With the power, though, comes elegance, resulting in a wine that is ready to develop over many years. - WE95
Displays blackberry, cherry and hints of sweet tobacco. Full-bodied, with soft, velvety tannins and a long, caressing finish. Very pretty and solid. This is structured and chewy. Needs time.- WS93
Tasted at the Château Giscours vertical, the 2005 Château Giscours is a blend of 62% Cabernet Sauvignon and 38% Merlot picked between September 22 and October 6. Conspicuously deep in color, both the aromatics and palate replicate the strong performance from earlier this year. The bouquet offers very fine intensity with blackberry and cedar, here a tinge of cassis that becomes accentuated with time. The palate is medium-bodied with fine, slightly grainy tannin. It is very well balanced and almost Saint Julien in style. It is clearly very focused with a sustained, mineral-rich finish that (as I said before) contains real energy. This is an excellent Giscours that will age nicely over the next 20-25 years. - WA92
The Story
Giscours has a long, rich history, which can be traced back to the fourteenth century. At that time it was a defensive tower overlooking a wild and inhospitable region. The real beginning came in 1552, when Pierre de Lhomme, a wealthy Bordeaux draper, bought a nobleman’s house called “Guyscoutz”; he proceeded to turn it into a vast estate and planted the first vines. Wine production was launched and each of the rich merchant’s successors made their own contribution to this magnificent building. It was in the nineteenth century under the promise, Pescatore and Cruse families that Giscours gained much of its finery: the château was transformed into neoclassical palace, architect Eugene Bülher and the production facilities were modernized with the construction of huge buildings, including the famous «Ferme Suzanne”. The history of Giscours represents a fascinating story, full of countless anecdotes…
The Terroir
Located in the Margaux appellation, in the communes of Labarde and Arsac, Giscours exceptional terroir presents all the qualities required to produce a great wine. The soil components are ideal. Three magnificent gravel hilltops deposited by the Garonne at the beginning the Quaternary era are one of the key features. The gravel plays a vitally important role, reflecting the sun’s rays and maintaining a stable temperature during the night, thereby providing ideal conditions for the ripening of the grapes. The topography is equally important: an altitude of twenty meters for the hilltops of Petit and Grand Poujeau, and seventeen meters for that of Cantelaude, whose slopes reach down to the château itself, in an east-westerly direction. The gentle climate is another beneficial factor. This subtle balance gives the terroir its undeniable finesse…
The Team
“A great wine is not the work of one man, it is the result of a tradition that is upheld and refined”, wrote Paul Claudel This tradition, inseparable from the greatest wines in the Medoc has passed down the generations at Giscours.
In recent years, a young dynamic team has combined this ancestral expertise with the latest technology: the team takes a permanent care of the vines with the passing seasons, hand-picked harvests are the subject of special attention, and plot by plot management is constantly refined with substantial investments in the vineyards…
Ensuring that the best grape varieties are matched with the extraordinary terroir, providing the vital link to this fabulous alchemy, the men of Giscours have only one guiding principle: a growing quality, making it consistent and inherent to this great wine…