Château Lafite-Rothschild
The Château Lafite-Rothschild in Pauillac in the Médoc near Bordeaux is one of the most famous châteaus ( wineries ) in the world. The estate has 178 hectares of land, 103 hectares of which are devoted to viticulture. It has been run by Saskia de Rothschild, the daughter of Éric de Rothschild , since March 2018 .
Owner and Classification
The estate is owned by the French branch of the Rothschild banking family . In the evaluation of the Bordeaux wineries on the occasion of the world exhibition in Paris in 1855 , Lafite-Rothschild's outstanding position was crowned with the rank of Premier Cru Classé .
This evaluation was carried out along the long-term ranking lists in trade circles, according to the achievable sales prices of the wines. In these lists, Lafite-Rothschild long occupied first place.
Apart from Lafite-Rothschild in Pauillac , only the estates Château Latour in the same place, Château Haut-Brion in Pessac and Château Margaux in Margaux were found in the official classification of 1855 as Premier Cru wineries.
As a special feature, the Lafite-Rothschild winery has the right to cut a small area of 4.5 hectares from the neighboring municipality of Saint-Estèphe apart from the local appellation Pauillac .
location
The estate is located in Pauillac in the north, directly on the municipal border with Saint-Estèphe in the valley in front of the hill and next to the former sister estate Château Mouton-Rothschild , on the "Route du Vin", the departmental road no. 2.
The vineyards of Château Lafite-Rothschild as well as those of Château Mouton-Rothschild, located further south, are located on a hill up to 30 meters high. The more than 8 m thick gravel layer of this dome rests on a limestone base. This ballast comes from deposits of the nearby Gironde , which were washed up fluvoglacial from the Pyrenees at the end of the Günz glacial period .
The Cabernet Sauvignon grape variety thrives on this soil. In addition to the fact that the soil is extremely barren and that the yields are therefore naturally reduced, the heat balance of the vineyards, which is favored by the gravel, contributes to the earlier maturity of the grape variety. Due to the massive gravel layer, the vine plant is forced to drive the roots very deep into the ground; the range of nutrients is more diverse and has a minor influence on the variety of aromas in the wine. The Lafite-Rothschild vineyards also have excellent drainage towards the Jalle du Breuil . The Jalle du Breuil was laid out by the Dutch in the Middle Ages to drain the Médoc, which was then swampy.
Wine
The vineyard area is 103 hectares; it is planted with 71% Cabernet Sauvignon , 25% with Merlot , 3% with Cabernet Franc and 1% with Petit Verdot . The average age of the vines is 30 years. Since the wine from vines that are younger than 10 years (currently approx. 20 hectares) does not go into the Grand Vin , the average age of the vines for the first wine is 40 years. The Gravière plot was planted in 1886 and was still in production in 2001. In normal years, the winery produces around 500,000 bottles of wine , including the second wine "Carruades de Lafite". Château Lafite-Rothschild is accompanied and advised by the oenologist Jacques Boissenot (died 2014) and his son Eric.
Lafite has a centuries-long reputation for top-class wine, which the estate did not always live up to in the 20th century. Only since the 1980s has it been producing top quality wines again and again. The best wines were from the wine critic Robert Parker with full 100 Parker points awarded : the vintages 1953, 1982 (in June 2009 to 97+ PP downgraded), 1986, 1996, 2000, 2003 and 2008 (98-100 PP). The 1959 wine (99 PP) has an excellent reputation. In very rare cases it is offered in stores at four-digit prices (as of 2007: approx. 1,690 euros). There are wine connoisseurs who swear by the last Lafite vintages before the phylloxera disaster and are prepared to pay five-digit euro prices for a bottle of Lafite before 1875, depending on the vintage.
A bottle from 1899 was offered for sale in May 2007 in the “Galeries Lafayette” department store in Paris for 8,385 euros.
history
Regardless of the dating of the property, the name Lafite can be traced back to the year 1234. Gombaud de Lafite was then abbot of the Vertheuil monastery north of Pauillac. In addition, the feudal rule of the Seigneurie de La Fitte can be traced back to the 14th century . The name can be attributed to the expression la hite attributed that in the dialect of Gascony hills means.
It is documented that part of the current property belonged to the feudal lord of la Fitte Joseph (Saubat) de Pommiers in the 17th century. When he died around 1670, ownership passed to his wife Jeanne de Gasq, as the marriage remained childless. In 1670 Jeanne married the liege lord of Bègles, Jacques de Ségur. Under his leadership, the agricultural areas of the estate were partly converted into vineyards.
Alexandre de Ségur, second son of the marriage between Jacques and Jeanne, married Marie-Thérèse de Clauzel, sole heir of Château Latour, in 1695. This liaison started an era in which the Ségur family owned an impressive portfolio of first-class wineries with Lafite, Latour, Château Phélan Ségur and, for a short time, Château Mouton. There is evidence that Nicolas-Alexandre de Ségur, born in 1697, joined the family business in 1716. Nicolas-Alexandre, later known as Prince des Vignes (French: Prince of the vineyards ), made the wine known throughout Europe.
In the business books of the winery it is recorded that Great Britain's first Prime Minister Robert Walpole ordered a barrel of wine from Lafite four times a year in the years 1732–1733 . Louis François Armand de Vignerot du Plessis , Marshal of France since 1745 , also made the wine known at the royal court of Versailles.
After the death of Nicolas-Alexandre de Ségur, that of Louis XV. was appointed Marquis , the property passed to his four daughters. Lafite was bequeathed to Marie-Thérèse, who married Aléxandre de Ségur-Calon. Their son Nicolas Marie Alexandre de Ségur finally inherited the winery, but had to sell it in 1784 due to an overwhelming debt burden. After a Herr de Monthieu appeared as a buyer, the property went to the President of the Parliament of Bordeaux, Nicolas Pierre de Pichard, barely two years later . He was close to the de Ségur family, so that they could continue to exercise their influence on the estate. During the French Revolution , de Pichard was executed on June 30, 1794 and the estate became state property. In a letter dated May 24, 1787, Thomas Jefferson certifies the wines the rank of premier cru.
A public auction was held on September 12, 1794. Château Lafite went to the Dutchman Jean de Witt. De Witt left the technical management to Joseph Goudal, who managed the estate for the next several decades despite several subsequent changes of ownership. De Witt had to sell the estate to the three Dutch Baron Jean Arend de Vos Van Steenvwyck, Othon Guillaume Jean Berg and Jean Goll de Franckenstein as early as 1800.
In 1816 the estate went to the Vanlerberghe family. Ignace-Joseph Vanlerberghe was a major grain merchant and important supplier to the French army. He was married to Barbe-Rosalie Lemaire. When her husband died in 1821, she sold the estate to the British banker Samuel Scott. Until 1867, first Samuel Scott and later his son managed the winery, while they left Joseph Goudal in charge of the day-to-day business. When the succession of Aimé-Eugène Vanlerberghe (son of Ignace-Joseph and Barbe-Rosalie) came up in 1866, it turned out that Château Lafite still belonged to the Vanlerberghe family and that the sale in 1821 was purely fictional to the French To avoid the law of the division of inheritance. Samuel Scott, as the house banker of the Vanlenberghe family, had only been sent as a front man, thus covering the family's intentions. Contrary to the original intentions of Barbe-Rosalie Lemaire, the property went to the three sisters of Aimé-Eugène, Comtesse de Villoutreys, Comtesse de Cornudet and Comtesse Duchâtel. The three families finally agreed on a public auction of the property, which was completed on August 8, 1868. The buyer was James Mayer Rothschild ; the bid total was 4.4 million francs.
The Rothschild era
Nathaniel de Rothschild , nephew and son-in-law of James Mayer, had already acquired the neighboring Château Mouton-Rothschild on May 11, 1853 . Much has been speculated about the true intentions of the James Mayer purchase. The most likely one seems to be that he viewed the winery as an excellent income property. On the occasion of the World's Fair in 1855, Château Lafite was classified as Premier Grand Cru and thus confirmed the classification published by Abraham Lawton in 1815. From Lafite's books it can be seen that the sales prices of the wines subsequently exploded, and the prices of the superb 1868 vintage were not to be exceeded for a century.
James Mayer died just three months after the acquisition. His three sons Alphonse, Gustave and Edmond took over the management of the winery. The general heyday of Médoc wines was to last for almost 15 years, but was interrupted many times by powdery mildew , phylloxera and later by the chaos of war and the global economic crisis of the 1930s. Between 1882 and 1915, a number of vintages were not bottled for reasons of quality. During the Second World War , the winery was occupied by the German Wehrmacht from June 1940, and it is reported that Hermann Göring would have liked to own the renowned estate. The Rothschild family's properties were confiscated and Château Lafite was converted into an agricultural school in 1942.
After the war, Gustave's grandson, Baron Élie de Rothschild , was able to win back the partly destroyed estate, now under the name Lafite-Rothschild. Inspired by the three exceptionally good vintages in 1945, 1947 and 1949, he began a whole series of repair work on the buildings and in the vineyards.
At the beginning of the 1960s, the sales efforts of the Bordeaux wine trade paid off, as new markets, especially the United States market, opened up. At the beginning of the 1970s, however, wines that were too tannic were produced that did not develop harmoniously later. From 1974, Élie was supported on the estate by his nephew Éric de Rothschild . Eric stepped up investments and replaced the technical staff. In 1987 he invested in a round barrel cellar with 2,200 barriques, which was designed by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill .
Through the domaines Barons de Rothschild (DBR), which belongs to Château Lafite-Rothschild and is based in Bordeaux , Baron Éric de Rothschild has over the years several wine-growing companies in France ( Château Rieussec (1984), Château Paradis Casseuil (1984), Château l 'Évangile (1990), Domaine d'Aussieres (1999)) and overseas ( Viña Los Vascos (1988), vineyards on the Penglai peninsula in Shandong province in China (2008)). In addition, DBR has owned the Château Duhart-Milon-Rothschild since 1962 and has been selling the wines of the Château Peyre-Lebade winery, which belongs to Baron Benjamin de Rothschild , since 1993 . DBR is also responsible for the management of Château Lafite-Rothschild and for the marketing and distribution of its wine.
literature
- Charles Cocks, Edouard Féret, Bruno Boidron: Bordeaux et ses vins . 18th edition. Èdition Féret et Fils, Bordeaux 2007, ISBN 978-2-35156-013-6 .
- Horst Dippel: The wine lexicon . 3. Edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13826-4 .
- Joachim Kurz: The Rothschilds and the Wine. A success story from Bordeaux . Econ Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-430-30005-3 .
- Robert Parker : Parker's Wine Guide (= Collection Rolf Heyne ). Heyne, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-453-16305-2 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rupert Millar: All change at Château Lafite as daughter set to take over , accessed on November 18, 2017
- ↑ Alexis Lichine: Alexis Lichine's Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits . Cassell & Company, London 1967, pp. 316-318
-
^ Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, Gutenberg Project
“Of Red wines, there are four vineyards of the first quality; viz. 1. Chateau Margau, belonging to the Marquis d'Agincourt, who makes about one hundred and fifty tons, of one thousand bottles each. He has engaged to Jernon, a merchant. 2. La Tour de Segur, en Saint Lambert, belonging to Monsieur Miresmenil, who makes one hundred and twenty-five tons. 3. Hautbrion, belonging to two thirds to M. le Comte de Femelle, who has engaged to Barton, a merchant: the other third to the Comte de Toulouse, at Toulouse. The whole is seventy-five tons. 4. Chateau de la Fite, belonging to the President Pichard, at Bordeaux, who makes one hundred and seventy-five tons. The wines of the three first, are not in perfection till four years old: those of de la Fite, being somewhat lighter, are good at three years; that is, the crop of 1786 is good in the spring of 1789. These growths, of the year 1783, sell now at two thousand livres the ton; those of 1784, on account of the superior quality of that vintage, sell at twenty-four hundred livres; those of 1785, at eighteen hundred livres; those of 1786, at eighteen hundred livres, though they had sold at first for only fifteen hundred livres. Red wines of the second quality, are Rozan, Dabbadie or Lionville, la Rose, Qui-rouen, Durfort; in all eight hundred tons, which sell at one thousand livres, new. The third class, are Galons, Mouton, Gassie, Arboete, Pontette, de Ferme, Candale; in all two thousand tons, at eight or nine hundred livres. After these, they are reckoned common wines, and sell from five hundred livres, down to one hundred and twenty livres, the ton. All red wines decline after a certain age, losing color, flavor, and body. Those of Bordeaux begin to decline at about seven years old. "
- Thomas Jefferson - ↑ Vines for the Empire . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 2002, p. 70 ( online ).
Coordinates: 45 ° 13 ′ 30 ″ N , 0 ° 46 ′ 23 ″ W.