Château Guiraud 2024

Critic scores

• James Suckling93-94
• Decanter93

The 2024 vintage in Sauternes

Vintage benchmark: 89/100 (appellation benchmark, not a score for this wine)

Vintage character: A rainy autumn reduced the crop to very little: the wines that were made are fine and light.

Overall reading of the year’s season across Sauternes. An estate can depart from it sharply, in frost or hail years, where two neighbours did not make the same vintage. What this particular wine actually gave is on its technical sheet and in the scores above.

Tasting

The 2024 vintage is marked by great freshness and liveliness. The nose opens with notes of white peach, candied lemon, bitter orange zest, dried apricot and black tea. The palate, with measured concentration, is airy, tense but retains the standards of the appellation: smoothness, roundness, complexity and aromatic persistence. Château Guiraud 2024 is, like the château wines, a balanced, generous, refined and finesse wine.

Blend of the 2024 vintage

Figures from the 2024 sheet

• 15 hl/haYield
• 100,000 bottlesProduction

Winemaking

Alcoholic fermentation with indigenous yeasts, in new French oak barrels

Ageing

18 months in new French oak barrels

Terroir

Situated 45 km south of Bordeaux on the left bank of the Garonne, Château Guiraud, with an area of 128 ha, has among its distinctive features that of lying entirely within the commune of Sauternes. The climate of the Sauternes appellation is oceanic. Winters there are mild and damp; spring, also damp, is temperate. Summers are moderately warm and give the vine a gradual ripening. It is in autumn that the weather conditions differ from those of a normal oceanic climate. The Sauternes district then comes under the influence of a particular microclimate, favouring the development of a microscopic fungus, botrytis cinerea or noble rot, without which Sauternes would not exist.