CHÂTEAU GISCOURS

95-97 points

Neal Martin, Vinous

It has a delightful and sensual bouquet with lifted, violet & peony-scented blueberry & black cherry fruit. This is very well-defined and perhaps the purest I have encountered from barrel. The palate is medium-bodied with a disarming silky texture, harmonious & focussed. It’s mineral-driven with a poised & pixelated finish. Certainly, this represents one of the best wines from this Margaux estate in recent years, echoing their golden period of the 60s and early 70s.

Driving up the famous Route des Châteaux through the Médoc, Giscours offers the first combination of wrought-iron gates/fountains/ sweeping driveway that tells you that you have really arrived in wine country. Through those gates is a stunning estate which under Eric Albada’s stewardship makes wines that have taken on a far more structures, masculine & powerful feel over the past decade in particular, and which has been better received as a result.

In the weeks leading up to en primeur week, as I chatted to various negociants about the wines they'd tasted so far, there was one château that consistently came up as the ‘insider’s tip’ for a property that had probably made its finest wine ever: Château Giscours.

Taking these tips with a judicious slab of salt, I was nevertheless intrigued to see what Giscours could do in a warmer year like 2022. Well, I needn’t have doubted my vinous friends, as it is the finest Giscours that I’ve ever tasted, and it certainly has the potential to be their greatest ever.

When tasting I noted “floral nose of violets & peony which gives way to pomegranate, boysenberry, black plum, oyster shell & graphite. Tannins are ripe with fantastic acidity and excellent tension on the palate & there is unerring freshness to this Giscours which persists on the finish. Excellent".