Louis-Gaspard Estournel

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Louis-Gaspard Estournel (* 1753 , † 1844 ) was the unmarried son of an old wine-growing family in Saint-Estèphe . His life's work is the famous Château Cos d'Estournel winery .

He recognized the quality of the extremely barren pebble soils ( Cos , Koss spoken) on the slope of Saint-Estèphe, which is opposite the equally famous Château Lafite-Rothschild winery , and bought large parts of this area in the course of his life. He built a huge wine cellar for his winery with style elements from Asia , including the pagoda-like curved roofs and the famous door from the harem area of the Sultan of Zanzibar .

His sales activities took him on ship trips to Africa , Arabia and India . He made the best sales with the Mughals , the kings and princes of India, and with the sultans of the coastal regions. On his return trips he often brought Arab horses to Europe.

Estournel recognized the value of the voyage of wine in wooden barrels early on. Once when he was unable to do consistently good business, he brought unsold wine back home from India. He compared it with the same wine left at home and found a considerable improvement in properties. He marked the wines returned in this way with an “R” for “retour des Indes”, back from India. They were literally torn from his hands. From then on, all of his wines were to go on a boat trip before they could be sold.

His real estate transactions, however, the extensive building activity and the expensive costs of winemaking let him get deeper and deeper into debt. At the end of his long life, impoverished and completely in debt, he had to hand over the property to his banker friend. However, he was allowed to stay in the vicinity of his beloved vineyards.

Louis-Gaspard Estournel died a year later at the age of 91, shortly before the work of his life, his winery Château Cos d'Estournel , was ennobled with the classification of Deuxieme Grand Cru .