L’Oratoire de Chasse-Spleen Haut-Medoc

The greatest Médoc wines have chosen, and they were the first to do so, to select their vintages so as to enhance the assets of this great wine, and to reduce the vintage-years’ vagaries and guarantee some stability in their qualitative supply. In the seventies, many Médoc vintages embarked on this course. Chasse-Spleen, in turn, took part in this movement in 1979, with Oratoire de Chasse-Spleen. The practical experience allowing winegrowers to dedicate such and such a vine plot to the great wine or to the second wine, is through grape tasting.The grape juice can indeed vary in taste from one year to the other, while the soil remains unchanged. Chasse-Spleen’s soil is a set on two types of ground: gravel on a calcareous-clay sub-soil and clay on limestone. Rainfalls and sunshine throughout the year will produce a different nature in the berries that grow on a particular plot of land. Furthermore, we have to agree that the Chasse-Spleen team know of the inability of some plots, whatever the climatic data, to produce the first wine. We call them quality C plots. The great soils spare us a lot of watch-time because they are very self-sufficient. On the other hand, more work has to be done on « lesser-expectation » plots : they have to be incessantly pulled in the increase. Thus, in working so as to enhance the quality potential of each class of plots, all our vintages must raise their quality accordingly. Plots which might fall into the great wine category, thus answering climatic data particular to the year, we call quality B plots. The other plots which give year in year out a great wine, from experience and without any major climatic hitch, , are called quality A plots. The age of vines being decisive regarding the quality potential, some plots might pass accordingly from C to B and eventually to A. With the second wine, some grapes from quality B and C plots can be found, whereas there are solely grapes from quality A and B plots in the great wine. Like-wise, the ampelography and viticulture have strinkingly and sufficiently improved, so as to better adapt a rootstock to the ground. This also precipitates the hierarchical promoting of the vine-stock.