In 1820, Jean-Dominique Laudet returned to France from the Caribbean, where he had spent twenty years in the spice trade, to fulfill his dream of producing Armagnac, the oldest French alcohol.  It was then that he acquired the Château Laballe, on the edge of the Landes and the Gers, a region once called Grand Bas Armagnac. Laballe soon gained a storied reputation for its Armagnacs, which were exported to the United States and beyond. 

Eighth-generation proprietor Cyril Laudet now oversees the domaine, but he owes a debt of gratitude to his grandfather Noël for truly bringing the business into the modern era.  Noël had been the steward of Bordeaux’s Chateau Beychevelle, but returned home in the early 1970s to run the family business, and determined that it should establish itself as a producer of top-quality estate-bottled table wines as well as its exceptional brandies.  Domaine Laballe was in fact the very first producer in Gascony to establish themselves as a producer of still wines as well as Armagnacs.

Since he took over the property, Cyril has extended the range of wines and now offers dry and sweet white wines, rosé and red wines with three different appellations.  The vineyard is situated on a unique land called Sables Fauves. The Sables Fauves, gentle slopes of silty clayey sediments, contain iron oxide which brings minerality and freshness to the wines and Armagnacs. From efforts in the vineyard to the vinification and aging, everything is done to extract the maximum expression of the terroir.  Harvesting is done by night, or early in the morning, especially white varieties. Thus, the grape retains freshness that we can recognize in the wines. Each variety is vinified separately; when the vinification is finished and the final blends are created, the individual lots are chosen according to the typicity of their expression of terroir and contribution to the balance of the final assemblage.

www.laballe.fr

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