Armagnac Tasting at Chateau Maniban

After phone calls and stopping to ask directions twice, we finally found Chateau Maniban, home of Castarède Armagnac, just outside the town of Mauleon d'Armagnac in the Bas Armagnac region.

Armagnac is similar to Cognac, but you may have only heard of Cognac because the Cognac region had a distinct advantage over Armagnac--the Charente River which gave it the ability to ship it's products out to the Atlantic and the rest of the world.

The Armagnac region is divided into three different growing areas: Bas Armagnac, Haut Armagnac and Armagnac-Ténarèze. I think "bas" in this context would translate as "lower", meaning the Bas Armagnac region is at a lower elevation.

Steve had called ahead and spoken with Florence Castarède and even though she was not at Chateau Maniban today, she let her groundskeeper know that we were coming and asked him to give us a tour.

Here is a view of the vineyard from the castle. Pierre, the groundskeeper told us they have 18 hectares of land (about 44 acres). We also learned from Pierre that a hectare is a square area that is 100 meters on each side (10,000 square meters). I love the metric system. It's so logical.



After the grapes are harvested they are crushed here:



Then the juice is pumped into vats here and made into wine in 10 days.



The vats are currently full of wine.



Next the wine is pumped into this still. This is Pierre standing in front of it. They have just this one still for their entire operation here.



Here is how the still works. The wine (yellow) is pumped to the left where it is heated by a wood fire and turned into vapor (blue). The vapor is forced under pressure back to the right where the cold wine causes it to condense back into liquid, Armagnac, which is captured in the barrel.



The Armagnac is aged in these barrels. Pierre only spoke French, and while he was very gracious and spoke very slowly, we didn't learn much about the aging process.


Finally, we saw the bottling room where Mr. Jean, who is the vintner, let us taste some Armagnac! Here you can see he is putting some 1973 into a glass. It was wonderful. We also tasted the XO (a blend of different years), the 1971 and the 1939. The 1939 was really good. And only $1092 a bottle!
No, I didn't buy it. Strangely, it made me think of Hitler and WW2 which started in 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland. I bought the 1973 which had a few less digits in the price.