Château Cheval Blanc
Château d'Yquem is an estate in the Sauternes district of Bordeaux, where arguably the most famous dessert wine in the world is produced. It was the only Sauternes château to be rated Premier Cru Supérieur in the official classification of 1855 and is priced accordingly.
The estate of Yquem was owned by the King of England in the Middle Ages. Late harvest wine has been produced here since at least the late 1500s. The 113 hectares of vineyard are situated on the highest hill in Sauternes.
The soil here is ideal for sweet wine production - warm, dry top soil of pebbles and gravel lies on top of a layer of clay that retains water and helps the noble rot to develop.
The Yquem vineyard is planted with approximately 75% semillon and 25% sauvignon blanc. A team of around 150 expertly trained pickers makes several passes through the vineyard each year, picking only fully botrytised berries. Yields are very low - around 900 litres per hectare, or about one glass per vine.
In the cellar, the grapes are pressed three or four times, with increasing pressures resulting in lower volumes but higher sugar levels. Yquem ferments in new oak barrels for maximum control over small batches. The aim is to produce a wine with 13,5 vol. % alcohol for a wine with 120 to 150 grams of residual sugar per litre. The alcohol content may vary by about 1 percent depending on the sugar level.
The individual batches, organised by day of harvest, are aged separately for six to eight months, after which a first selection and a preliminary assemblage are carried out. After a further 20 months or so of ageing, the barrels are tasted again and the final wine is produced from the best lots. On average, around 65 000 bottles are produced each year, although in bad vintages the entire crop is sold off anonymously (this happened nine times in the 20th century).
Yquem can show yellow fruit, tangerine, toast and vanilla when young and develops a rich complexity with age. In top vintages, it can age 50 years or more. Yquem also produces a dry Bordeaux Blanc called Y. This is made mainly from sauvignon blanc harvested at the beginning of the harvest, with small quantities of semillon with a little botrytis.
The estate was owned by the Lur-Saluces family from 1785 until 1999, when it was sold to LVMH.
