Grand Vin du Château Margaux
The harvests required more delicate work than usual and therefore took longer, but this extra care was necessary to achieve the aromatic purity that characterises Château Margaux’s wines. The red grape harvest began on the 11th of September with the first plots of Merlot. The grand vin Cabernet Sauvignon plots were picked on the 22nd of September. Harvesting was completed on the 5th of October.
Château Margaux 2023 is a fine, precise, complex wine. It accounts for 41% of the total volume of the harvest. Although it cannot match the exceptional density of its predecessor, it has the same aromatic style and the same silky tannins.
In some respects, it has exceeded our expectations after the rain in September. This vintage shows us once again how great terroirs are capable of adapting and expressing their exceptional quality in the wines.
The Château Margaux blend is still mainly Caber¬net Sauvignon, at 89%. 5% Merlot, 4% Cabernet Franc and 2% Petit Verdot make up the rest of the blend.
Margaux
Climate
The winter of 2022-2023 was relatively mild, although there were about ten days of real winter temperatures in the first half of February.
There was also not much rain during the first few months of 2023: 196 mm in Margaux, allowing only a very light replenishment of groundwater reserves after an extremely hot, dry 2022 vintage. In these conditions, bud break occurred between the 3rd and the 10th of April.
Fortunately, spring did not bring any of the feared frosts. Rain was sparse but frequent during the growing season. There were just two weeks of sustained rain in June (72 mm). However, these conditions made it potentially difficult to keep the vines healthy. The high relative humidity in the air created very favourable conditions for downy mildew. Our vineyard teams succeeded in main¬taining healthy foliage to ensure good-quality ripening of the grapes and a successful harvest.
The vines flowered between the 31st of May and the 5th of June in good conditions, with no signs of coulure or millerandage.
2023 was markedly different from the previous vintage in terms of temperature. In 2022, there were very early heatwaves. In 2023, we had just one real heatwave, between the 17th and the 24th of August, the period when the grape skins mature, becoming thinner and more sensitive to the com-bined action of high temperatures and sunshine. The berries that were most exposed to the sun suffered scalding, forcing us to do a lot of sorting during the harvest.