The Vineyard

Château Turcaud is located in the heart of the Entre-Deux-Mers, between the Garonne and Dordogne rivers, 35 kilometres east of the city of Bordeaux and 20 kilometres south of Saint Emilion, next to La Sauve Majeure Abbey, a UNESCO world heritage site.
The vineyard is set on gentle slopes, at approximately 100 meters' altitude, on silt soils that frequently contain gravel and sometimes clay.

Grape varieties of Chateau Turcaud Wines 

• The white blend consists of 65% Sauvignon (¾ Sauvignon Blanc, ¼ Sauvignon Gris), 33% Sémillon, and 2% Muscadelle.
• The red wines are 2/3 Merlot and 1/3 Cabernet Sauvignon.
• Both red and white grapes for the Cuvée Majeure are selected from the best vineyard plots.
• The rosé is almost exclusively made from Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. Finally, the Clairet is made from around 50% Merlot and 50% Cabernet Franc.

Vineyard management 

Around ten people take care of the vineyard all-year-round.
The entire operation focuses on total quality, from caring for the vines right through to château bottling of the entire harvest.

This requires a great deal of manual work: winter pruning starts on 15 November and is finished around 15 March, then, when the fine weather arrives, the vine shoots are attached to the training wires, followed by de-suckering, leaf-thinning, and green-harvesting on each individual vine.
In 2009, we also started mowing the grass under the vines, rather than using chemical weed-killer. This time-consuming technique has been extended to more plots every year and weed-killer has been eliminated from over half of the vineyard in the past two years.

Similarly, de-suckering and leaf-thinning are carried out exclusively by hand, without using any chemicals.
Although the grapes are machine-harvested, we sort the entire harvest from each vineyard by hand.
Finally, over the past fifteen years, all new planting has been at a higher density (around 5,000 vines per hectare), with the aim of producing more concentrated grapes.