Château de la Dauphine

The property sits as a working wine estate set over 53 hectares of vineyard, with its cultivated land resting on a complex sequence of soils grouped into three principal families. The upper ground includes a clay‑limestone plateau underlain by a local limestone formation known as calcaire à astéries. Below that, vines occupy a shallow clay‑limestone slope resting on the molasse deposits of the Fronsadais, molasse being a softer sedimentary rock. The lowest band, the pied de côte or lower slope, consists of clay‑silty‑sand layers that lie over a clayey subsoil. These contrasting ground types are reported as fourteen distinct soil types organized into those three families.

A notable element of the winery infrastructure is a circular vat room arranged to use gravity rather than pumps in the movement of grapes and juice. This round vat house is fitted with a single mobile arm described as unique in the Bordeaux region; grapes are routed by gravity into individual vats and the moving arm enables the harvest from single parcels to be handled separately within the circular installation. Adjoining the fermentation and storage areas, the estate also contains a barrel cellar set partially below ground level, a semi‑buried space used for aging wine in barrels.

The château building itself presents a formal façade capped by a pediment that bears the coat of arms of the de Richon family. Photographs and visual records note that frontage and the armorial device on the frontispiece as standing features of the property. Regarding production on site, the estate makes two principal red wines: the château’s namesake wine composed of roughly eighty‑five percent Merlot with fifteen percent Cabernet Franc, and Delphis de La Dauphine, which is produced from pure Merlot. These elements—the vineyard extent and soils, the gravity‑managed circular vat house with its mobile arm, the semi‑sunken barrel cellar, the façade with the de Richon armorial, and the two main red wines—are the documented physical and working features of the estate.