Château COUTET Les Demoiselles 2018 (DAVID-BEAULIEU Family)

DESCRIPTION

The LES DEMOISELLES cuvée is the "classic" version of the Émeri cuvée: the wine is the same, but the bottle is sealed with a cork where the Émeri cuvée is sealed with an emery stopper.
This wine is made with grapes from the estate's nearly century-old vines, worked by hand without any tractor, and the wine is also produced by hand and without electricity.
The grape varieties are blended in the following proportions :

• 50% Merlot à Queue Rouge,
• 50% Cabernet Franc, locally called Bouchet,

Note that the Merlot à queue rouge is an old variety of Merlot which, according to the estate, dates from the Middle Ages : it is characterized by low yields and by the production of small grapes, unlike recent varieties of Merlot which are more productive and whose yield must be voluntarily limited. The genetic heritage of this Merlot variety has been carefully preserved by the estate over the centuries thanks to the sélection massale, a reproductive technique consisting in cutting the mother plant in order to preserve all its characteristics.

TERROIR

The estate's century-old vines are located on two plots in the Peycocut locality. The surface area is only 0.85 ha, and the soils are dating from the Oligocene, a tertiary geological period which took place between -34 and -23 million years and during which the Aquitaine basin experienced many geological events characterized by a gradual withdrawal ot the seas that covered the region. The basin then resembled a marine golf with the presence of lakes and swamps at the origin of a fluvio-lacustrine sedimentation. A last marine trangression took place during this period, and is at the origin of a starfish fossil-rich limestone bench deposit called Calcaire à Astéries.

Covered by a thin layer of colluvial deposits, this limestone terroir is the nourishing substratum of the old vines producing the LES DEMOISELLES wine.

WINEGROWING & WINEMAKING

The David-Beaulieu family insists on this rare and historic fact : they have never used pesticides, weedkillers or synthetic products for the vines care, and the estate obtained the Organic Agriculture certification in 2012. This environmentally friendly approach has been further developed by adopting the agroforestry principles.

The action is concrete and the result is there : out of the 16 ha of vines, 4 ha are not cultivated and are reserved for flora and fauna. Flowers and tall grass are part of the landscape, the plots are surrounded by hedges to attract a maximum of birds and insects.

The plots in the Peycocut locality are also cultivated manually and the soil is ploughed by a draft horse. The vines yield does not exceed 27 hl/ha.

The same care is taken during the different winemaking stages, which are carried out entirely by hand, without any electricity use: The grapes are harvested and carefully sorted by hand, grain by grain. They are then placed manually in a tune where the must begins its alcoholic fermentation under the indigenous yeasts actions. The must is regularly hand-pigmented for a better extraction of colour and aromas. The malolactic fermentation also takes place under the native bacteria action.
The must is then matured for 18 months in one-wine oak barrels (70%) and in new oak barrels (30%).