Château Haut-Brion

The first of Bordeaux’s great wines It was in the Graves region, the closest to Bordeaux, in this vineyard “outside the walls”, that Jean de Pontac created the Château Haut-Brion wine estate in 1525, and in 1549 had the north wing of today’s château built. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, his descendants, through patient technological research, succeeded in producing a new type of wine that was at the origin of the great wines of Bordeaux. These efforts enabled Arnaud III de Pontac to identify and personalise his production from 1660 onwards. From this time onwards, the wines of Pontac, and later Haut-Brion, enjoyed immense success in London. The cellar book of King Charles II of England mentions “Haut-Brion” at the royal table in 1660-1661. The first of the great Bordeaux wines was born. It was soon followed by a number of other famous estates. The first to exist, Haut-Brion has maintained its pre-eminence throughout its history, which is closely linked to that of Bordeaux and France as a whole. Some illustrious men have left their mark on Haut-Brion. They include Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, when he was Minister of External Relations during the Consulate and Empire, and more recently the Ambassador of the United States of America in Paris, Clarence Douglas Dillon, who also served as his country’s Minister of Finance when J.-F. Kennedy was President. For nearly five centuries, the owners and managers of Haut-Brion have been obsessed with continuity in quality. A Premier Cru cannot afford any technical delays or mistakes. Once it has risen to the top, it must stay there. “In the last third of the 17th century, Haut-Brion was the inventor of the New French Clarets (the ancestors of today’s great vins de garde), and in the early 1960s, it was the first of the Grands Crus to innovate by using new stainless steel fermentation tanks. As early as 1972, it was the first to improve the grape varieties used for replanting through a patient and painstaking personal clonal selection. Classified as a Premier Cru in the Gironde in 1855, Château Haut-Brion was also classified in 1973, although the latter classification only concerned the Médoc and Haut-Brion is located in the Graves. The minutes of the 1973 classification meeting state: “The jury considered the situation of Château Haut-Brion, which has a very long tradition of being one of the Médoc’s premier crus. Taking into account this tradition, customs and usage on the one hand, and the same eminent qualities of this growth on the other, it felt it should be included by assimilation among the Médoc Premiers Crus Classés”. In August 2008, Prince Robert de Luxembourg succeeded his mother, Madame la Duchesse de Mouchy, as head of Domaine Clarence Dillon, owner of Château Haut-Brion.