Château Pontoise Cabarrus

Parcel work beside the Gironde

The fruit comes in parcel by parcel before Eric Tereygeol, winemaker at Château Pontoise Cabarrus in Saint-Seurin-de-Cadourne, decides what the cellar should ask of it. He works on a family estate the Tereygeols have tended since 1959, carrying forward the practice of his father, Émile, without turning inheritance into a fixed recipe. His technical base was formed at Université de Bordeaux, but the daily discipline is local: gravel under vine, estuary weather, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Petit Verdot coming from the same Haut-Médoc ground. Laurent Tereygeol is named with him in the running of the property, and the house remains a family cellar rather than a consultant-led address. The estate itself reaches further back, with origins in the 18th century and a name shaped by the Cabarrus family, yet the working line here is more immediate. Eric speaks of balance in plain terms, structure without hardness, suppleness without slackness. His own sentence is the clearest map of the method: “We don’t follow recipes, we listen to the land.”

Gravel, steel, and measured oak

The vineyard covers 28 hectares in the northern Haut-Médoc, on gravel soils along the Gironde estuary, where drainage and retained warmth matter to Cabernet Sauvignon. The estate is classified Cru Bourgeois Supérieur and works under a sustainable philosophy, with High Environmental Value Level 3 certification named among its practices. In the cellar, Tereygeol keeps the method legible: stainless steel fermentations, French oak barrels, and a measured proportion of new wood. The grand vin has been published, for the 2016 vintage, as 55% Cabernet Sauvignon, 43% Merlot and 2% Cabernet Franc; the 2017 vintage was aged with 33% new oak. Those figures do not read like ornament. They set the frame for a wine built on black fruit, tannin, and the restraint expected of the appellation. Château Pontoise Cabarrus and Cote Pontoise are the signatures attached to Eric’s name, with the first carrying the estate’s Cru Bourgeois Supérieur identity and the second giving another Haut-Médoc expression of the same hands.

A working château, not a display room

The room here is the cellar and the vineyard before it. Visits move through a historic Médoc estate, but the mood is quiet, practical, and instructional rather than staged around design. The château sits in Saint-Seurin-de-Cadourne, close to the Gironde, with rows of vines on gravel and a cellar atmosphere that keeps the work in view. This is a small family property by feel, even when its history reaches through Bordeaux names and old holdings. The tasting room carries that same register: guided, direct, concerned with Haut-Médoc know-how and the choices that turn estate-grown fruit into still red wine. The place has traditional château charm, but the more durable texture is the sound of a working cellar around barrels, tanks, and the current release of Château Pontoise Cabarrus.