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Wine Description
The Story
Château Giscours (Margaux AOC): This Classified Growth in 1855 is the first label of Château Giscours. It is of great finesse and elegance. Delicacy and power are combined in this flask to bring you the elegance expected of a great Margaux wine. The aging potential of this great wine is between 8 and 20 years or even more for the most exceptional vintages.
“A great wine is not the work of one man, it is the result of a tradition that is upheld and refined”, wrote Paul Claudel
This tradition, inseparable from the greatest wines in the Medoc has passed down the generations at Giscours.
In recent years, a young dynamic team has combined this ancestral expertise with the latest technology: the team takes a permanent care of the vines with the passing seasons, hand-picked harvests are the subject of special attention, and plot by plot management is constantly refined with substantial investments in the vineyards…
Ensuring that the best grape varieties are matched with the extraordinary terroir, providing the vital link to this fabulous alchemy, the men of Giscours have only one guiding principle: a growing quality, making it consistent and inherent to this great wine…
Vintage 1996
The 1996s stand as a “classic” Bordeaux year, although – as Jancis Robinson MW has written – not in the “skinny” sense; although Farr Vintners’ director, Tom Hudson, told the drinks business that it was perhaps a “very good” rather than a “truly great” year as it wasn’t uniformly excellent across the region.
By way of a recap, 1996 was a particularly sterling vintage for Médoc wines. The Berry Bros & Rudd website extolls: “This is one of the great post-war vintages for Médoc Cabernet-based wines. They are rich, complex and beautifully balanced wines, packed with ripe, pure fruit and have the structure that will allow the top wines to age well into the next decade and beyond.”
The Right Bank by contrast are described as “distinguished” but “overshadowed” by the ‘95s – which was an especially good vintage for Saint Emilion and Pomerol.
It was also an excellent vintage for white Bordeaux.
Robert Parker’s scores tend to favour the Left Bank, though a few of the very best wines of the Right Bank received very respectable reviews as well.
Only two wines received 100-points: Lafite and Latour, Margaux was rated 99, Léoville Las Cases 98, Ducru Beaucaillou 96 and Pichon-Comtesse 96.
La Mondotte was the highest rated Right Bank wine on 97-points, Ausone was the next best rated on 93 as was L’Eglise Clinet, while Gomerie, Petrus and Le Pin settled for 92 and Cheval Blanc for 90.
With the passage of nearly 20 years, the wines have naturally appreciated and now that they are well into their drinking window demand will almost certainly begin to push prices up even further for the most in-demand among them.
The figures are often impressive, to date Lafite has seen a rise of 657.9% since its release, its second wine Carruades is up 592%, Latour has risen 437%, Petrus 400% and Pichon Baron 240%.
