Château Vrai Canon Bouché

The château

Vrai Canon Bouché stands on a promontory above the rolling country of Fronsac, looking out to the Dordogne, and its long name carries the name of a 19th-century owner, M. Bouché. Charles Cocks, the Englishman whose Bordeaux, ses environs et ses vins became, with Édouard Féret, the guide of the Bordeaux trade, placed a Plateau de Canon under Bouchet in the first class of the côtes of Fronsac in 1850, at 10 tonneaux (the old Bordeaux measure of a crop, 900 liters, or 4 barrels). The guide kept Canon under Bouché into the 1880s and under Condemine from 1893, and when Féret gave the Libournais a volume of its own, Saint-Émilion et ses vins of 1908, the name had become Château Vrai-Canon-Bouché. He counted it among the largest and finest estates of the district: 57 meters up, a delightful view from its terrace, 10 hectares of vines, meadows and groves on limestone and clay and limestone, 20 tonneaux in an average year, and an owner, M. Condemine, a graduate of the national school of agriculture at Montpellier, who kept up the tradition his predecessor, M. Bouché, had left him. The notice ran again in 1922.

The modern owners came and went: the Roux family in 1953, the Dutch businessman Philip de Haseth-Möller in 2005, LFP Grands Vignobles de France in March 2014. In July 2021 Château de La Dauphine, in the Labrune family since 2015, bought it: 13 hectares of vines on clay formed by the decarbonation of limestone, full of fossil starfish, planted 70% Merlot and 30% Cabernet Franc from mass selection. The plan was for organic certification, due in 2022, to let these grapes go into the grand vin (the estate’s first wine) of La Dauphine; Château Vrai Canon Bouché is still sold under its own name. The house, built in the 18th century and renovated in 2018, is let as 6 guest rooms, with windows onto the barrel cellar.

At a glance

Appellation

Canon-Fronsac

Commune

Fronsac

Classification

No classification

Owner

Château de La Dauphine, the Labrune family, since 2021

Vineyard

13 hectares

Soil

Clay from the decarbonation of limestone, with fossil starfish Terroir of Canon-Fronsac →

Grapes

Merlot 70%, Cabernet Franc 30%, from mass selection

Wines

Château Vrai Canon Bouché

The house

Also Château de La Dauphine, Fronsac, and Château Canon Pécresse, Canon-Fronsac

In history

First class of the côtes of Fronsac, 1850; 10 hectares and 20 tonneaux under Condemine, 1908 and 1922