Famille Vigouroux

Returning to Haute-Serre

Holiday work came first for Bertrand-Gabriel Vigouroux, winemaker at Famille Vigouroux in Cahors, before the estate became a chosen life. He has said that riding horses was his early pull, yet each holiday and summer placed him beside his father at Château Haute-Serre, close to the vines and the routine of Malbec. By 18, the choice had narrowed into a plain sentence to his father: he wanted to work there, and to live in Haute-Serre. The house dates to 1887, when Georges Vigouroux began the family’s work in the Lot, and Bertrand-Gabriel now carries that fourth-generation line through Cahors AOC. The apprenticeship is not presented as a school credential or a named outside master; it is the slower family method, built through repetition, harvest by harvest, on land where Malbec is native work rather than a borrowed brief. Famille Vigouroux operates across several estates and ranges, with around 115 hectares under vine in Cahors and the South-West, but the center of gravity remains precise: Cahors Malbec, handled as a regional inheritance and a living crop.

Malbec across terraces and plateau

The program rests on two principal expressions of place. Château de Mercuès sits on the third terraces of the Lot Valley, in the communes of Mercuès and Caillac, while Château de Haute-Serre stands on the siderolithic plateau of Kimméridgian origin at Cieurac. That separation matters at the bench of the winery, because Famille Vigouroux treats Malbec as a grape capable of several Cahors voices rather than a single house shape. The portfolio named by the house stays close to varietal purity: Château Pech de Jammes 2015, Pigmentum Malbec rouge 2021, Petit Jammes rouge 2023, and Lucter de Haute-Serre 2020 are all listed as 100% Malbec. Red wine carries the main line, with rosé also part of the range. Grand Malbec 2022 gives the work its clearest outward marker: the first Malbec to appear on the Place de Bordeaux, from Château de Haute-Serre.

The cellar, the vineyard, the tasting room

The place moves between vineyard, cellar and hospitality without making the wine feel secondary. At Château de Haute-Serre, the tasting room introduces the secrets of Malbec through thematic workshops in small groups; at Château de Mercuès, the sensory work broadens through taste, smell and sight. Outside, the Lot Valley terraces give the vines a stepped relation to river and slope, while the Cieurac plateau changes the register underfoot. Château de Mercuès carries its own weight: a 13th-century building, once the summer residence of the count-bishops of Cahors for seven centuries, now folded into the family’s wine tourism and table. The room is quiet by design, not emptied of life, but paced for attention. The glass comes with place still attached to it.

A Cahors release with a longer reach

In July 2024, Maison Georges Vigouroux released the first Malbec from Cahors onto La Place de Bordeaux, a public step for a grape the family had already been tending in its homeland for generations. The point is not novelty alone. It is continuity given a wider pass, with Bertrand-Gabriel Vigouroux keeping the work tied to Château de Haute-Serre even as Grand Malbec 2022 travels beyond Cahors.