Chateau Quinault Picture of: Type: Size: Country: Region:
Design/Artwork: Winery Notes/History: Château Quinault L'Enclos is a tiny walled Château and vineyard within the city of Libourne in what was until 1973 the satellite appellation Sables Saint Émilion. The Château can be dated back to the 17th century and was bought by the negotiant Baptiste Mons in 1930. It is thought that the Château takes its name from a famous writer - Philippe Quinault (1635/1688), who was a very popular Parisian dramatist and librettist at that time. Quinault wrote the words for opera music composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully (known as librettos). During the reign of Louis XIV this team produced 11 operas, or tragédies lyriques en musique, as they were originally called. These spectacles comprised of a prologue and 5 acts and were enormously successful. They combined chorus, soloists, dancers, sumptuous decors, elaborate special effects, and rich costumes adorned with hundreds of ostrich plumes. You could say that Lully and Quinault were the Rogers and Hammerstein or the Andrew Lloyd Webber of their day. Part of Quinault's vineyard was lost to the cemetery of the church near by in the 1930s and the vineyard was reduced to a smaller size. The wines are known as a Vins de Garage as though the vineyard may be tiny the wine has achieved somewhat of a cult status. Upon learning that a German real estate company planned to buy the property and construct a housing development, Dr. Alain Raynaud and Françoise Raynaud acquired Château Quinault L'Enclos. Dr. Raynaud, a former physician and a one time president of the Union des Grands Crus is also owner of the Pomerol estates Château la Croix de Gay and La Fleur de Gay and supervises at Château Lascombes. |