Bordeaux Chateaux (first published in a different form for the Oxford Wine Company)

Every wine region needs its identity – Chile and Carmanère, South Africa and Pinotage, Germany and Riesling. Bordeaux, whether it likes it or not, has chateaux.

And not just one or two. In France’s largest quality wine region (Appellation Controlée, meaning wine coming from a designated area and following specific rules of production), there were at last count between 9,000 and 9,500 chateaux, down from a high of 20,000 in 1987. In a region that has around 115,000 hectares of vines, and covers 130 km from north to south and 105 km east to west, that’s a lot of real estate.

Of course, not all of them are sprawling country estates complete with turrets and moat. The word chateau actually means simply a wine producing estate with its own buildings, and can range from large and opulent to small, modest and family-run. One of the fascinating things about the region is how the size of the chateau tells you a lot about the history of the appellation. In the Medoc, for example, the average size property reaches 40 hectares, and the estates tend to be large and imposing, the classic image that adorns Bordeaux wine bottles. This is because most of the chateaux there are recent constructions, a mere 200 or 300 years old, having been built by wealthy Bordelais and Parisians in the 17th and 18th century. Until then, the Médoc was largely swampland, but the Dutch with their clever techniques of diking and ditching, revealed the gravelly terroir that lay beneath, and paved the way for the long-living cru classé wines of Pauillac, St Julien and St Estephe that are so prized today.

What links the idea of chateaux in all regions is the attention to detail, the small, hand-crafted production that individual estates allow, and the tradition and heritage that they represent.