• France
• Bordeaux
• Medoc
• Margaux

The 2010 growing season provided us with the perfect conditions to express the special character of the Margaux terroir in a harmonious blend of dense, complex Cabernet Sauvignon and rich Merlot that reached rare levels of opulence.
From the beginning to the end of the season, the soils in the 2010 vintage had a slight deficit in water supply and quite moderate variations in temperature.
The cold, rainy spell we had in June during the flowering of the Merlot vines helpfully provided us with a light, natural thinning of the crop.
The moderate water deficit stress in the vines combined with alternating cool nights and hot, sunny summer days enhanced the ripening process of the grapes without any danger of fungal diseases. This made it possible for us to wait for each plot to reach its optimum moment of ripeness before we harvested.
The Merlot was the first to take the floor on September 30th, while the Cabernet Sauvignon had the last dance on October 20th.
This superb raw material, with outstanding anthocyanin potential, produced a fabulously dense vintage that has lovely freshness and great fruit precision.
The Merlot found excellent acidities with Cabernets-Sauvignons that proved the perfect foil to balance the high levels of alcohol reached again this year.
In this vintage, we trialled the pigeage extraction technique (punching down the cap of skins) on a vat of Merlot and another of Cabernet Sauvignon, so as to extract in the gentlest way possible all the richness contained in our grapes.
Already, the results from these vats, selected from the finest plots on the plateau of Cantenac, have fulfilled all our expectations and confirmed not only the outstanding quality of the Prieuri-Lichine terroir but also the effectiveness of these technical evolutions.