Château Pape Clément

Château Pape Clément is a Bordeaux wine from the Pessac-Léognan appellation, ranked among the Crus Classés for red and white wine in the Classification of Graves wine of 1959. It is the oldest wine estate in Bordeaux, harvesting its 700th vintage in 2006. The winery and vineyards are located in the commune of Pessac, south-west of the city of Bordeaux. When the estate was omitted from the initial Graves classification of 1953 it caused some controversy.

Planted in 1300, the estate is the oldest planted vineyard in the region, when it was presented to Bertrand de Goth upon his appointment as archbishop of Bordeaux, by his brother, Berald. It received its name from Bertrand's papal name, Clement V; on his election in 1306 he gave the estate to his successor as archbishop, Cardinal Arnaud de Canteloup. Bertrand, who would later move the papacy to Avignon near Châteauneuf-du-Pape, planted this original vineyard with red wine grapes. White wine grapes were planted across the river near the town of Lormont. The vineyard remained in the possession of archbishops of Bordeaux until the Revolution, when it was nationalised and sold as a bien national.

After the Revolution, a succession of owners oversaw the development of the property as a commercial enterprise, and by the middle of the 19th century the estate was widely regarded to be second only to Haut-Brion, though under the ownership and expansions of Jean-Baptiste Clerc from 1858 to his death just before 1880, the wines of Pape-Clément was selling at a price equivalent to a Médoc second growth. Later owners, including an Englishman named Maxwell who neglected the estate, experienced difficult times, with hail devastation in 1937, the onset of World War II and the expansions of the suburbs of Bordeaux coming closer.

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