Château Tour de Gilet Bordeaux Supérieur 2018

A traditional Bordeaux blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Petit Verdot from the outstanding 2018 vintage, the 2018 Château Tour de Gilet can rightly lay claim to be the finest wine to date from this overachieving property. And that says a lot given this château’s enviable track record under Claude Gaudin. Although always bolder and richer in flavor than most Petits Châteaux, Claude Gaudin’s 2018 Château Tour de Gilet truly shines, offering an enticing bouquet of blackcurrant, cassis, and cedar. In the mouth a delightful mélange of forest berries, black cherry and damsel plum meld with rich ripe tannins. Structured, impeccably balanced, and endowed with traditional Bordeaux character and style, we were again hard pressed to find a better, more affordable Petit Château than the 2018 Château Tour de Gilet. This is truly a sleeper, and it will only get better with additional time in bottle. For optimal enjoyment, we suggest serving this exceptional red Bordeaux at cool room temperature (58°-62° F) after 20-30 minutes of aeration. Drink now through 2025. Salut!

When Bordeaux is good, it is very good. To that point, the 2018 vintage produced a bevy of exceptional red Bordeaux wines, including the 2018 Château Tour de Gilet, a red Bordeaux that provides the ideal foil to poultry, red meats, rich sauces, and hearty stick to your ribs kinds of dishes. Claude Gaudin’s 2018 Château Tour de Gilet makes an ideal companion to sautéed veal medallions topped with a mushroom sauce as well as roast duckling served with a blackberry reduction, wild rice, and haricots verts. A grilled veal chop topped with wild herbs provides another perennial favorite as does a tomahawk steak served with caramelized onions and creamy, rich au gratin potatoes. Soft, creamy cow’s milk cheeses also provide beautiful complements to this wine, but almost any simple, fresh, high quality dish will provide a welcome accompaniment to the full-bodied, superbly made 2018 Château Tour de Gilet. Bon Appétit!

Château Tour de Gilet turns out high quality traditional red Bordeaux under the expert guidance of master winemaker Claude Gaudin. This little gem of a property just shy of 15 acres is located in Ludon in the Haut-Médoc, home to the Classified Growth Château La Lagune. Château Tour de Gilet is built on the foundations of the ancient Abbey de Gilet, which dates from the 12th century and whose vineyard has long been revered. Even in the medieval period the estate’s vineyard was surrounded by “jalles” or small crisscrossing drainage canals to help produce wines of higher quality. Today, oenologist Claude Gaudin makes an extraordinary wine at this diminutive property, using techniques such as dense planting in the vineyard, green harvesting to lower the yield, strict sorting at the harvest, and very natural winemaking for maximum expression of the fruit.

Claude Gaudin is renowned for turning out several of Bordeaux’s best Petits Châteaux wines. In addition to Château Tour de Gilet, Gaudin fashions two outstanding Petits Châteaux that border the Margaux commune, Château Barreyre and Château Laronde Desormes, as well as the celebrated Château Maurac Haut Médoc, whose neighbors are the renowned Château Sociando-Mallet and Château Charmail in Sainte-Estèphe.

Bordeaux is the world’s largest fine wine producing region, encompassing nearly 300,000 acres, 60 individual appellations, and more than 7,300 châteaux. Appellations such as Margaux, Pauillac, and St. Émilion are legendary as are the scores of collectible wines that flow from their vineyards. Indeed, the wine wares of Bordeaux (both the region and its wines are referred to as Bordeaux) are some of the finest and most expensive on Earth. Furthermore, this renowned viticultural region, which has become synonymous with full-bodied red wine, is also the traditional home of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc, the three musketeers of almost all red Bordeaux and the basis for Meritage blends around the world. Malbec, Petit Verdot, and even Carmenère are other red Bordeaux varietals that figure into the cépage or blend of many Bordeaux châteaux. What remains unknown to many American consumers is that Bordeaux is also one of the planet’s largest and greatest sources of white wine, principally from Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon. Nonetheless, Bordeaux’s best kept secret is the plethora of fine Petits Châteaux, such Château Tour de Gilet, that offer tremendous quality and value, especially in superb vintages such as 2018.