Photo : Jibi44 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Château Margaux
Known from the twelfth century, it was then called "la Mothe de Margaux" and did not yet own vines. In 1152, Eleanor, heiress of the duchy of Aquitaine, married Henry Plantagenet, the future king of England Henry II. Aquitaine thus belonged to England until 1453 (the illustration here shows the surrender of the town of Bordeaux to the... French!!! in October 1453, at the end of the Hundred Years' War), a real blessing for Bordeaux wines, to which the English market opened. Richard the Lionheart, son of Eleanor and Henry II, adopted claret as his everyday table wine. At the end of the seventeenth century, Château Margaux covered 265 hectares, a surface from which it would not depart; a third of the estate is devoted to the vine, as is still the case today.
