Last December, France’s Le Lous family made their debut into the wine world with the purchase of Château Cantenac Brown, an estate that’s considered one of the top in Bordeaux’s Médoc region. The 220-acre estate—a classified Third Growth—was founded in 1806 by a Scottish merchant named John Lewis Brown, and there are still Scottish sheep roaming the grounds. The red-brick, Tudor-style castle sits on wooded parkland dotted with two-century-old sequoia, Atlas cedars Evergreen and Northern red oak, and overlooks the Gironde estuary. Over the years, it emerged as an artistic landmark thanks to Brown’s grandson, a naturalist painter who brushed elbows with Degas, Manet and Pissaro. Now, together with estate manager José Sanfins, 40-year-old Tristan Le Lous is trying to find the balance between nature and technology to ensure a sustainable future for the vineyards.
Sanfins already started converting the vineyards toward sustainable viticulture in 2006, and now the plan for a carbon-neutral winery is underway and slated to be completed in time for the 2023 harvest. The eco-construction project is designed around a cellar built of raw earth that will provide the ideal humidity for aging of the wines. Working with architect Philippe Madec, considered a pioneer in this type of construction, the 5,000-meter cellar will be built using raw wood from the surrounding Aquitaine region and utilize a thousand-year-old technique of compressing raw earth—composed of clay and sand—onto the château’s walls to form a new building without needing to use any cement.
The low vault, crafted from compressed clay blocks, will be the only in Europe to have a structure of this scale. The way the building is designed will avoid the need for air conditioning, since it creates an atmosphere that offers balanced temperature and humidity levels to ensure the stability of the wines in barrel without the need for energy consumption. A large number of small vats in the vat room will allow for separate vinification by parcel, as well as high-precision blending, and since the winery is gravity-fed, the grapes will be gently handled and carefully preserved. “We are aware of nature’s generosity and its importance for our terroir. Château Cantenac Brown stands at the heart of parkland that has conserved its remarkable biodiversity for more than two hundred years,” explains Tristan Le Lous. “It is our duty to respect that legacy; our entire approach is uncompromisingly based on an ecologically responsible philosophy.”