Vieux Château Certan Winery
„The finest wine of the appellation.“
Thienpont family
Buy wines from Vieux Château Certan
At Vieux Château Certan, a family of owners obsessed with quality meets perhaps the best terroir in the entire Pomerol appellation.
When it comes to continuity, Vieux Château Certan is one of the best in the whole of Bordeaux. In its almost 300-year history, which began in 1740, there have only been two changes of ownership. The founding Demay family, a family of wine merchants from Scotland, was followed by the Parisian de Bousquets family, while the Demays kept five hectares for themselves and founded Château Certan de May. Finally, the Belgian wine merchant family Thienpont took over the estate in 1924 and has now been running it for almost 100 years in the third generation with Alexandre and, since 2014, together with his son Guillaume. Alexandre has introduced everything that has led to a significant improvement in quality. He introduced green pruning, analysed the vineyard and divided it into 23 plots. He made a second wine called "La Gravette de Certan" to further refine the quality of the Vin de Garde, renovated the fermentation cellar and ensured that 100 % of the wine was aged in new wood. That was the fashion in the 1980s and 1990s. Today it is more like 65 %.
In addition to all these measures, the terroir, which consists of gravel, clay and gravel soils and loamy soils in equal proportions, is crucial to the fantastic quality, with around 70 % Merlot, 25 % Cabernet Franc and 5 % Cabernet Sauvignon. Many of the vines are between 60 and 80 years old. Each parcel has its own stainless steel or wooden fermentation tank. After the classic mash fermentation, the wines mature for 18 months in Séguin Moreau and Sylvain barriques. The "La Gravette de Certan" is a pure Merlot, mostly from vines planted in 2010 and a small parcel from 1998.
photos: Vieux Château Certan