Château Guiraud

The Free Bacchus Story

A census taken on the estate in 2010 counted 635 species of insects, spiders and bees — more than three times what a Bordeaux vineyard typically carries. Biodiversity is a word almost every château now uses. This is one of the very few places that has counted it.

The work behind that number started long before the certificate. The estate began what its managers called a cultural revolution in 1996, stopped synthetic treatments that same year, and gave up insecticide entirely in 2004. Organic certification arrived only in 2011, fifteen years later — the first 1855 classified growth anywhere in Bordeaux to hold it, and the first in Sauternes.

Guiraud also keeps its own conservatory of Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc clones, well over a hundred of them, maintained as a living genetic bank. Most estates plant whatever the nursery supplies, and commercial nurseries have narrowed the available material considerably.

When the owners decided to sell in 2006, the estate manager did not wait to find out who would buy it. Xavier Planty assembled a consortium — with Robert Peugeot, Olivier Bernard of Domaine de Chevalier and Stephan von Neipperg — and bought the château himself.

That is why the farming survived the sale. The person driving it became an owner, which is the only reliable way a long conversion outlives the manager who started it.