France C.

The history of the Château de France The Château de France was built on the foundations of an old manor house of which it preserves the beautiful vaulted cellar... a mansion built at the end of the seventeenth century by the prosecutor Philippe Decoud. From the tening of Gardère to the tening of France? The castle has retained the name of the old locality on which it was built. It is probable that the lands of France were once only part of the tenement of Gardère. The current domain of France is indeed, before 1681, only a set of small plots gathered in the sixteenth century by Marseau Dubasque and Jean de Latreilles. Indeed, we have read that, in 1648, the ploughman Morseau Dubasque buys the plots of land held by André Dejean, carpenter of barrels... It is a Councillor to the Parliament of Guyenne, Taffard, who develops the vineyard of the Château de France in the eighteenth century in a key period: that of the birth of the qualitative notion of Grand Cru. He followed in this another family of parliamentarians, the Pontacs in Haut-Brion, which explains the wine development of the Graves southwest of Bordeaux in the eighteenth century. Notoriety at the end of the nineteenth century Jean-Henri Lacoste, merchant in upholstery fabrics, owner of the estate for 32 years, is the creator of the current castle: after the purchase in 1862 of this property of 25 hectares which does not bear the name of castle but simply of domain or country, he takes the property in hand and has it recognized by wine hunters such as Feret who , after neglecting it in his work of 1850, finally mentions it in the following volumes. J.H. Lacoste increases the estate with some annexes: a meadow room instead of Noaillac and a meadow located in Gardère and belonging to the Griffon family (owner of the future Fieuzal and Haut Gardère!).