Château la Commanderie has a purple robe with garnet tints. The pleasing bouquet offers wild strawberry, blackberry, blackcurrant with fine chocolate notes. The mouth is fruity, juicy and shows very good balance with fine and bright tanins. Château la Commanderie is elegance personified. The wine is long on the palate, very well balanced with outstanding fruit.
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Commanderies will continue to exist as long as there are military orders.
Under the responsibility of Commanders, “commanderies” were places where communities of monks, knights and affiliated persons lived and acquired learning. They were sometimes located in urban areas and even in ports, if knights had acquired the monopoly of commercial privileges or the transport of pilgrims.
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In 2012, when the Saint-Emilion classification was last revised, Château La Commanderie was awarded the rank of Grand Cru Classé.
The terroir of Château La Commanderie lies on an extension of gravel terraces, whose pebbly soils mix with iron-rich sand to produce wines of a very special and refined complexity. The vines here enjoy a south-facing exposure.
The cellars are situated in the middle of the vines –a convenient location that allows the team to work to the highest standards of quality. They comprise temperature-controlled concrete fermentation vats and recently renovated first-year and second-year barrel cellars.
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Appellation : Saint-Emilion Grand Cru - Grand Cru Classé
Surface Area : 3,7 ha
Sun Exposure : South-Facing
Soil : Gravel, ferruginous sand and clay
Wine density : 6 500 vines/ha
Average age of the wines : 40 years
Cultures Practices : Reasoned and grassing
Harvest : By hand, in small crates, several sortings
Ageing : 18 months - 50% new oak
Œnologist Consultant : Hubert de Bouard de Laforest.
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No detail is overlooked in each of Magali and Thibaut Decoster’s plots, which faithfully depict the Saint Emilion vineyard area, in which houses, cellars, small parcels, entrance drives, walls and vegetation are attractively interspersed and which was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its viticultural landscape.
To ensure that the environment is properly conserved and preserved, care and respect for the natural environment is central to the estate’s wine-growing philosophy. Clos des Jacobins and Château la Commanderie were part of the first group to sign up to the SME environmental management system (Système de Management Environnemental) for Bordeaux wines in June 2011. Fully functional since then, the system has sought to limit the impact of business activities on the environment. It not only seeks to make vine-growing and wine-making practices more sustainable, it also covers such areas as the management of vehicles and buildings, the travelling to and fro of personnel, emergency situations and regulations compliance.
This is backed up by a common sense approach and the adopting of viticultural methods that are in tune with nature: seeding cover crops in the rows, mechanical working of the soil, the reconstitution of natural eco-systems (aided by the planting of natural hedgerows around the parcels), and the sorting of waste – a whole host of environmentally-friendly techniques that are used whenever and wherever possible.
Last but not least, with the support of the Libourne GDON (a body set up to fight harmful organisms), the wine estates of Magali and Thibaut Decoster have collectively undertaken to limit pollution, preserve bio-diversity and reduce phyto-pharmaceutical sprays. This GDON has especially developed an innovative, collective method to monitor the territory biologically, whereby an observatory is being trialled for the detection and a better anticipation of the risks relating to harmful organisms in vine-growing environments. The ultimate aim is to reduce the need for phyto-sanitary spray-product use.