Château Le Puy

The Free Bacchus Story

Le Puy sits on the same limestone plateau as Saint-Émilion and Pomerol, a few kilometres to the east, but outside the borders of both appellations. The family house stands at 107 metres, the second-highest point in the Gironde.

The estate has never used synthetic chemicals. Not in the sense of a conversion that happened at some point and can be dated, but in the sense that the family running the property has farmed it continuously for generations and never adopted them when they arrived. Bordeaux was slow to take up organic farming, and as the New York Times put it in 2017, Le Puy “has been there all along.”

In 2017 they gave up the appellation, moving to the plainer Vin de France after concluding that the classification described something other than what they were doing.

The organic certificate comes from Ecocert, which has inspected the estate since 1995. Demeter France’s register also lists Le Puy for biodynamic farming, with a date of 30 June 2026. That date has passed, and when we checked on 9 October 2026 no renewal had been published, while 20 of the 24 other French Demeter estates we checked that day already showed 30 June 2027. Emilien, the main bottling, is about 85 per cent Merlot and spends two years in big old casks that add almost no taste of wood. In 2022 Le Monde put its price at around 35 euros in France, and that year a 1921 Emilien opened in New York was still alive and elegant.