Château La Croix de Gay

The château

In 1477 Antoine de Murat, commander of the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem, granted 11 tenements in Pomerol. One of them, la Barrauderie, on the high terrace, went to Mathelin and Michel Barraud, whom the Raynaud-Lebreton family, the owners today, count among their ancestors. Joseph Brugnet appears as a winegrower in the parish registers in 1772. Around 1900 the estate was run by Jean-Henri Angle, a cooper, who built the Château La Croix de Gay brand and, as the family tells it, would sell it only above the price of the classified growths of Pauillac; he also made the wine of neighbors, among them Rouget, Gazin and Certan. Édouard Féret, in Les vins de l’arrondissement de Libourne of 1897, listed La Croix de Gay among the second growths of Pomerol under J.-H. Angle, at 8 tonneaux (the old Bordeaux measure of a crop, 900 liters, or 4 barrels), and in his Saint-Émilion et ses vins of 1908 among the intermediate growths between the first and the second, split between Angle at 12 tonneaux and Pommier at 6. Handed down through the women, the estate passed through the names Angle, Barraud, Ardurat, Raynaud and Lebreton.

Noël Raynaud made his first wine in 1947, and the family still tells how the British wine merchant Harry Waugh found that it beat the Cheval Blanc of the same year every time he opened the 2 together. Four gold medals followed at the Concours Général Agricole in Paris for the vintages 1977 to 1980, and in 1983 the estate joined the Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux. When Noël Raynaud died in 1997, his daughter Chantal Raynaud-Lebreton, who had worked beside him for more than 10 years, took charge; her sons Jean-Pascal, Olivier and Julien carry it on.

The vines stand around Pignon, the medieval village of Pomerol, facing the old presbytery, on ruby Günz gravel over blue clay veined with iron oxides, with a northern exposure; the edition of Cocks and Féret of 1929 called the wine “a veritable ferruginous liqueur”. The vineyard is 95% Merlot and 5% Cabernet Franc, and the soils have always been worked or grassed without synthetic products; mating disruption takes the place of insecticides, and the estate holds Haute Valeur Environnementale (High Environmental Value, the French state’s environmental certification for farms) at level 3. The grapes are picked by hand into small crates, sorted in the vineyard and in the vat room before and after destemming, and run into vat by gravity after a light crushing; the wine ages in barrels, about half of them new. Axel Marchal, a professor of enology, advises on the wine and Paul-Marie Morillon on the vineyard. The cross of La Croix de Gay stands on the road to Santiago de Compostela and is a historic monument.

At a glance

Appellation

Pomerol

Commune

Pomerol, the hamlet of Pignon

Classification

No classification

Owners

The Raynaud-Lebreton family; Chantal Raynaud-Lebreton, since 1997, with her sons

Consultants

Axel Marchal, the wine; Paul-Marie Morillon, the vineyard

Soil

Ruby Günz gravel over blue clay with iron oxides; northern exposure Terroir of Pomerol →

Grapes

Merlot 95%, Cabernet Franc 5%

Farming

Haute Valeur Environnementale, level 3; no synthetic products on the soils; mating disruption instead of insecticides

Cellar

Picked by hand; sorted in the vineyard and the vat room; gravity; barrels, about half new

In history

A second growth of Pomerol under J.-H. Angle in 1897; an intermediate growth in 1908