Our vinification hall comprises concrete tanks whose volumes are adapted to the practice of parcel selection.
First the grapes are placed into the tanks after light crushing. Then, some pumpovers occur during the process of alcoholic fermentation (some fermenting must is extracted from the bottom of a tank and re-injected on the top).
The cooling or heating depends on the year.
The wine breeding starts after the fermentation and the 3 to 4-week maceration are over, and the vintage is then either placed into new barrels or barrels that have contained one or several wines before.
The breeding is done mostly in 225 liter oak casks, one fifth of which is changed yearly. The wood used to make these barrels comes from the center of France.
Then, the metamorphosis or “maturation magic” of Château Vieux Robin’s wines starts in the propitious darkness of our wine storehouse.
The different lots are then assembled after a 12 to 24- month refining period. Two months later, they are lightly filtered before being bottled.
One exception is our “Collection” vintage which is always refined in new barrels for 24 months.
Château Vieux Robin is located on the famous Medoc peninsula, about 40 miles from Bordeaux.
The local wine producing area stretches from west to east along the estuary. It has a great number of soils due to the presence of various outcropping geological layers: gravel and Riss to Wurm coarse sand, limestone-clay and carbonated marl-clay, and hard limestone known as “Begadan’s”. Thus, due to that variety of geological strata, the Begadan growths come from many different types of soils.
The area produces vigorous full-bodied wines, light and delicate ones, as well as all the imaginable intermediates.
Some of the soils of Château Vieux Robin can be found on the gravelly west bank of the Gironde, while others sit on the outcropping limestone-clay plateau. Château Vieux Robin offers a great balance of power and smoothness, thanks to the assemblage of grapes grown on its various soils.