Balloons, Mermaids & Margaux: Château Giscours 1938-2023

BY NEAL MARTIN | APRIL 3, 2025

Unless you’re a politician, then we all make mistakes. Even Jesus made mistakes. That is what made him human. Mistakes make us who we are—literally, in cases where excess alcohol is involved. We learn from our mistakes. Wine producers are no different, even if there is an unwritten law that forbids admission until a century later. Of course, wine critics never make mistakes. Our judgments are 100% correct. It’s the wine that got it wrong.

Alas, ripping the heart of your vineyard out and replanting with a less optimal variety is an action that cannot be remedied overnight. Even ChatGPT can’t sort that one out. It takes years to accept the error and even longer to resolve. This transpired at Giscours in the late seventies and eighties, at a time when Merlot was all the rage and was planted in prime land geologically and pedologically suited for Cabernet Sauvignon. General Manager Alexander Van Beek oversaw the gargantuan task of rectifying that mistake. Last year, he invited me to the château for a vertical of no less than 40 vintages. These wines tell the story of this Margaux estate with all its highs, lows and back to recent highs. Compared to its Bordeaux brethren, it has not been a smooth ride at Giscours, but as the saying goes, what tests you, makes you.

Comte de Pescatore purchased Giscours in 1845.

History

The first written reference to the Giscours property dates to 1330 and refers to a fortified keep. But the catalyst really dates to November 1552 when a wealthy draper, Pierre de Lhomme, acquired a maison noble called Guyscoutz from Gabriel Girault, Seigneur de la Bastide, for the princely sum of 1,000 livres. This was long before van Beek’s compatriots drained the Médoc’s boggy marshes, and yet, Lhomme still managed to cultivate a few vines. Come the French Revolution, Giscours had passed to Mon. de Saint Simon, though he scarpered off to Spain once he heard the guillotine being sharpened. After being confiscated as a bien nationale, in 1795, the estate was sold to two Bostonians, John Gray Jr. and Jonathan Davis. To the best of my knowledge, the pair represent the first American proprietors in Bordeaux, and one can speculate whether they were inspired directly or indirectly by Thomas Jefferson’s forays into the region several years earlier. The partnership lasted 30 years, whereupon the property was purchased by Parisian banker Marc Promis, whose name forms the appendage to his other property, Rabaud-Promis, in Sauternes.

Befitting a grand estate, architect Eugene Bühler designed the neo-classical château in 1837, subsequently joined by a sprawl of outbuildings constructed by the Cruse family, plus a narrow lido with a statue of a mermaid at one end (an emblem that originates from an Irish owner who put this part of his family crest on the label, hence the name of the second wine, Sirène de Giscours). Promis sold the estate for 500,000 francs in 1845 to Comte de Pescatore, a wealthy Parisian banker. In 1855, Giscours celebrated its status as a Third Growth, though it was a bittersweet occasion, as Pescatore passed away around the same time. In 1870, the year that the Franco-Prussian War broke out, two Bordeaux merchants, Gambès and Barry, drank Giscours in a hot air balloon at a height of 2500 meters. According to newspapers, flying above Prussians troops, the pair threw one bottle from the nacelle with a note that read, “Delicious dinner, excellent Château Giscours, and bon appetite.” I really hope that story is 100% true.