It was our local Art-dealer friend Charles Asprey who pointed Vanessa Dubosq (born Cruse) of Chateau Laujac towards us.
You forget how big the Left Bank is until you head for Begadan to visit Laujac – it’s way beyond Pauillac and Saint-Estephe, and 75kms from the centre of Bordeaux.
When you finally arrive, you find that Laujac is a fascinating group of buildings – a chateau & farmstead with homes originally built for workers and sprawling land holdings with 61 hectares of vines, 400 hectares of forest and pastures for livestock. The chateau was built in 1810 in the classical style commissioned by M de Villemot, who had made his fortune furnishing guns and supplies to Napoleon.
The Cruse family were wine merchants from Denmark. In 1852 Vanessa’s Great-Grandfather Hermann Cruse was keen to buy a chateau and it came down to a choice between Laujac in the northern Medoc and Cos d’Estournel in Saint-Estephe. At the time, Laujac was held to be similar in quality to some Pauillac estates. Nowadays the hierarchy may be different!
Vanessa trained as an architect and met her husband Rene Dubosq in New York, while he was working for IBM. She started selling Laujac in the States before they both moved back to France to run the estate.
Laujac is a blend of 65% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Merlot and 5% Petit Verdot grown on gravelly soil with a hint of clay. Tour Corduoan, named after the island lighthouse close to the entrance of the Gironde estuary, is Laujac’s junior bottling, a 50/50 blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot from young vines and raised in oak for 6 months. Both wines are silky and very stylish.
