Château Bonnet

The château

The vineyard of Bonnet goes back to the 16th century, and the maison noble de Bonnet appears around 1560. On December 17, 1744 Pierre de Reynier sold the family property to Jean de Chillaud Desfieux, and in 1778 M. de Chillaud made a fine house of it; he sat out the Terror in a hiding place dug into the earth, still there in 1922, when presses cut into the rock still showed how large the old vineyard had been. Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, whose Bordeaux et ses vins was the reference book of the Bordeaux trade, list Château Bonnet in 1874 under Maumey fils, at 20 tonneaux (the old Bordeaux measure of a crop, 900 liters, or 4 barrels) of red and 100 of white. In 1897 Léonce Récapet, André Lurton’s grandfather, bought it. He replanted all the clay and limestone slopes in white grapes, and with his other estates he could make 500 tonneaux of white and 800 of red in an average year, with awards at Paris in 1900, Nantes in 1903 and Liège in 1905. André Lurton inherited Bonnet in 1953 and made it the cradle of his family’s vineyards. Since 2019 the group has been run by his children, with Jacques Lurton as president, and his grandchildren, with Mathilde de Caix-Lurton as managing director.

Bonnet has 135 hectares of vines, 85 of white and 50 of red, on clay and limestone and on clay and siliceous soils. The whites are planted 63% Sauvignon, 22% Sémillon, 11% Colombard and 4% Muscadelle; the reds 53% Merlot, 45% Cabernet Sauvignon and 1% each of Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. The group has been certified Haute Valeur Environnementale (High Environmental Value, the French state’s environmental certification for farms) since 2017 and has belonged to the Vins de Bordeaux ISO 14001 group since 2010; at Bonnet it uses biological controls on 18 hectares and keeps beehives. There are 18 wines, among them Château Bonnet in white, red and rosé, the Réserve, Divinus de Château Bonnet, Petit Bonnet and the Château Tour de Bonnet range.

At a glance

Commune

Grézillac, in the Entre-deux-Mers

Classification

No classification

Owner

Vignobles André Lurton; in the family since 1897

Direction

Jacques Lurton, president; Mathilde de Caix-Lurton, managing director; since 2019

Vineyard

135 hectares: 85 of white, 50 of red

Soil

Clay and limestone; clay and siliceous Terroir of Entre-deux-Mers →

Grapes

White: Sauvignon 63%, Sémillon 22%, Colombard 11%, Muscadelle 4%. Red: Merlot 53%, Cabernet Sauvignon 45%, Cabernet Franc 1%, Petit Verdot 1%

Farming

Haute Valeur Environnementale, for the group, since 2017; biological controls on 18 hectares

Wines

Château Bonnet, white, red and rosé; Réserve; Divinus; Petit Bonnet; Château Tour de Bonnet; 18 in all

In history

20 tonneaux of red and 100 of white in 1874; the slopes replanted in white by Léonce Récapet