Château Le Puy

Le Puy sits at the top of a clay and limestone plateau above the Dordogne valley at Saint-Cibard, in the Côtes de Francs on the right bank of Bordeaux. At 107 metres it is, by the family's account, the second highest point of the Gironde, and the name comes from that height: a puy is a high place. A ring of standing stones between two dolmens, which the family dates to the Bronze Age, still stands in the oak wood on the estate.

The Amoreau family traces its ancestors here to 1610, and the estate's story is mostly a story of things they refused. In 1868 Barthélemy Amoreau began to ask whether wine really needed sulphur. After the First World War Jean Amoreau refused chemical products in the vineyard. During the Second World War, with the men away, Paule Amoreau ran the cellar herself. After the war her husband, Pierre-Robert, was among the first members of Nature & Progrès, and the family counts Le Puy among the first Bordeaux estates certified to make organic wine. From 1990 Jean Pierre and Pascal Amoreau took up Barthélemy's old question, made wines with no added sulphur and brought biodynamics into the vineyard.

Half the land is still forest, meadow and pond, and the vines share it with horses, Limousin cattle, sheep and bees. Horses came back to work the soil in 2008. The ground is scored rather than ploughed, the vines are treated mainly with infusions of horsetail, nettle and buckthorn grown on the estate, and shrubs are planted between the rows. Three springs supply the water for the farm and the cellar. The estate holds Ecocert and Demeter certification.

In the cellar the rule is to intervene as little as possible. Fermentation runs in cement vats on native yeasts, the reds age for at least two years in old foudres and barrels chosen so the wood does not show, the wines made without added sulphur are stirred by hand on a lunar calendar, a bâtonnage the family calls dynamisation, and every cork is sealed under wax. There is no outside consultant, only a family committee and the estate's own laboratory, and the cellars are not temperature controlled on purpose.

Emilien is the wine of all the plots. Barthélemy, first made in 1994, comes only from Les Rocs, the vines around the family house, and is made without added sulphur. Retour des Îles first crossed the Atlantic under sail in 2012, ageing at sea. Marie-Cécile and Marie-Elisa, the whites, come from Sémillon vines more than seventy years old on average. Since 2012 the family also farms Closerie Saint Roc, a neighbouring property in Puisseguin that once belonged to Amoreau ancestors. Its wines now go out as Vin de France (one merchant dates the break with the Côtes de Francs appellation to 2017), and the family has asked the INAO to recognise Les Rocs as an appellation of its own, under the name le Puy. After four centuries, the Amoreaus are still arguing with the rules.