Château Nairac

Château Nairac is a Barsac estate in the north of the appellation, classified deuxième cru in the 1855 Sauternes classification, working around seventeen hectares planted roughly 90% Sémillon with small amounts of Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle. Production is small, on the order of 24,000 bottles a year.

The estate came to the Tari family at the start of the 1970s: Nicolas Tari, then owner of Château Giscours, bought it for his daughter Nicole and her husband Tom Heeter, an American who had been working at Giscours. The couple restored the property and made its reputation. Nicole kept it after their divorce in the mid-1980s, and their son Nicolas Heeter-Tari ran the estate from 1993 until 2021.

Since April 2022 the property has been let on a twenty-five year lease to Terres Bordelaises, the Helfrich family's Bordeaux arm of Grands Chais de France, with Jean-Marc Dulong directing. Nicole Tari remains the owner. Under the Heeter-Tari years the house style was defined by wood - fermentation in new oak and about three years of barrel ageing, long by classed-growth standards - which is what the older vintages in circulation reflect.