Winery Story

Chateau Ausone

On the limestone slopes at the southern edge of the village of Saint-Émilion sits one of Bordeaux's smallest and most coveted estates. Château Ausone makes barely a couple of thousand cases of wine a year, yet for more than a century it has stood at the top of the Right Bank's hierarchy. It is a property defined by paradoxes: ancient but restless, microscopic in scale but monumental in reputation, fiercely private yet world-famous. To understand it is to understand a single family's two-millennia relationship with one extraordinary hillside.

The House on the Hill

Ausone is named for Decimus Magnus Ausonius, the fourth-century Gallo-Roman poet and consul born in Bordeaux, who is said to have owned a villa on or near the site and to have planted vines in the surrounding hills. The claim is impossible to verify with certainty, but it is more than romantic invention: the remains...