Can a château come back from the dead?

In 1868 the Bordeaux trade's own directory, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, ran down the Third Growths of Margaux. Malescot-Saint-Exupéry, 120 to 150 tonneaux (a Bordeaux tonneau is 4 barrels, about 900 liters). Desmirail, 40 to 50. Becker, 7 to 8. Then this:

Ferrière (Ferrière) . . . . . . . 7 to 8

« Ferrière (Ferrière) ......... 7 à 8 »

Cocks and Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1868, p. 113

The name of the growth, then the name of the proprietor in parentheses, which is the same name, then the harvest. The proprietor column exists to tell a merchant whose door to knock on, and here it tells him only what the first column has already said. Lascombes, on the page before, gets a history and a quotation from a trade journal of 1838. Ferrière gets 2 words.

The directory went on listing Ferrière's rank for 54 years before it described the estate at all. When it finally did, in 1922, what it wrote was not about wine.

Later came 40 years in which there was scarcely any wine behind the rank. From 1952 to 1992 the only wine sold as Château Ferrière was a token bottling made away from the property, for the sole purpose of keeping the rights to the name. The books carried the rank throughout. Then, in 1992, Ferrière came back, with its own cellars and its own label.

Dubignon, in the same village, left the list between 2 editions and never came back. Ferrière did. If a rank is supposed to mean a wine somebody can drink, Ferrière's meant nothing for 4 decades, and still it was there when the wine returned. What, exactly, had the brokers ranked in 1855, that it could wait that long?

A widow's 6 tonneaux

In 1855 a widow named Ferrière was harvesting about 6 tonneaux of wine a year from a few hectares of vines in the village of Margaux. Every book that ranked the Médoc placed her estate below the Third Growths. William Franck's Traité sur les vins du Médoc, the Bordeaux wine merchant's book of prices and rankings, ranked it a Fourth in 1824, again in 1845, and again in 1853, 2 years before the brokers sat down. The wine poet Pierre Biarnez, in his rhyming tour of the Médoc of 1849, filed it among the Fourths with a compliment attached: "Often more perfumed than the best thirds."

Then the brokers of Bordeaux, drawing up the list for Napoleon III's Exposition Universelle in Paris that became the 1855 Classification, made it a Third. Armand d'Armailhacq, a Médoc proprietor whose treatise on the vine appeared the same year, explains why in 3 sentences:

Madame the widow Yank Ferrière harvests only about 6 tonneaux of wine. Mr. Franck places it among the fourth growths; but it has several times sold like the thirds. It can therefore be assimilated to the growths of that class.

« M^me veuve Yank Ferrière ne récolte qu'environ 6 tonneaux de vin. M. Franck le place parmi les quatrièmes crûs; mais il a plusieurs fois vendu comme les troisièmes. On peut donc l'assimiler aux crûs de cette classe. »

A. d'Armailhacq, La culture des vignes, la vinification et les vins dans le Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, p. 499

Yank is the given name as d'Armailhacq spells it; other books have her as the widow J. Ferrière. The vineyard is tiny and the proprietor is a widow, and neither fact counts. What counts is that the wine has several times sold at the money of the class above. Neither the soil nor the building enters the calculation.

Even the names were owners' names. André Jullien, the Paris wine merchant whose Topographie de tous les vignobles connus was the standard survey of the world's vineyards, explained in 1832 why he listed men rather than places: "most of the vineyards having no particular names, I shall give those of the proprietors under which they are designated in the country." That is the condition Ferrière was classified in.

The brokers put 5 Margaux names in the third class together, Saint-Exupéry, Desmirail, Dubignon, Ferrière, and Becker. Alfred Danflou, whose Les grands crus bordelais of 1867 was the first illustrated survey of the great estates, called it justice done. It was a price. The market had moved and Franck's tables had not, so what the brokers changed in 1855 was the books.

One judgment of the wine itself survives from those years. The tasting session held by the 11th class at the Exposition produced a list of awards, reported in 1857, and among the honorable mentions is "Madame the widow Ferrière, for her wine of Ferrière." Somebody did put the widow's wine in a glass, in Paris, and thought well of it. It is the only tasting judgment on Ferrière in this file before the 20th century.

A compliment recycled for 55 years

After 1868 the directory's line hardly changed. Ferrière got its 2 words again in 1874, in the English edition of 1883, and in 1886. Desmirail, when its turn came in 1886, got a château remodeled in the Louis XIII style and an artesian well. In 1893 a first name finally appeared beside Ferrière: Henri. In 54 years of listing the rank, that line was the entire description the trade's own directory carried of the wine.

The numbers tell you the size of the thing. Féret's supplement of 1901 gives the harvest of every classed growth for the 5 vintages from 1896 to 1900. Work Ferrière's row against the totals for its tier and it is making about 1% of the wine in its own class, in every one of the 5 years. A merchant could see that on the page in 1901, and could read nowhere in the same book what the wine was like.

Danflou tried to find out, and confessed inside his own chapter that he had learned nothing. "We have searched in vain, and even asked the proprietors of these growths, for documents, whether historical or viticultural, on these properties so remarkable in point of production," he wrote of the 5 Margaux Thirds. "We must suppose so," he went on, "for all our researches and approaches have been fruitless."

His chapter shows it. His Ferrière runs to 3 sentences. The first has the estate "bought several years ago by Mr. Ferrière, who gave it his name," which is wrong by about a century, as the directory's own account of 1922 would show, and adds that "if the vineyard is small, its products are of the highest distinction." It gives the estate 15 to 20 tonneaux, more than anyone else ever gave the place; the directory gave 7 to 8 the following year. The second recommends a vintage: "The harvest of 1847 made an epoch in the annals of Girondine enology." The third reports that the wines, "much sought after by gourmets, are today sold out."

The vintage traveled further than the compliment. A London survey of the classed growths published in 1920 under the initials G.A.K. reports that the 1847 "really formed a landmark" in the history of Girondine winemaking, and the 1922 edition of the directory says the wines of 1847 made an epoch. The 1847 was 75 years old when the 1922 edition recommended it, and Danflou had reported it drunk in 1867. For 55 years, in 3 books and 2 languages, the most recent thing any of them could say about the wine of Château Ferrière was a harvest from before the Classification existed.

Everything was bought except the name

Everything about Château Ferrière was bought by somebody else, and the rank never moved. Start with the crop. Merchant houses held the monopoly of Ferrière vintages, the arrangement by which a Bordeaux firm takes an entire harvest, from Rosenheim in 1883 to Calvet in 1912 and 1913. In at least 9 of the 31 vintages between 1883 and 1913 the whole crop was spoken for, from the day it was picked, by a single house. Everything not thought good enough for the grand vin, the estate's first wine, went out under another name, Château Monadey-Margaux, from Henri Ferrière's property in the low riverside palus, which made more than twice what his classed growth did.

Then the estate. In 1914 Henri Ferrière sold to Armand Feuillerat, who already owned Château Marquis de Terme, the Fourth Growth in the same village. By 1922 the classed growths of Margaux tell a consistent story: Malescot and Marquis d'Alesme-Becker both belong to a London firm, Desmirail is listed as sous séquestre, under judicial sequestration, and Ferrière belongs to the man who owns the Fourth Growth up the road.

That ninth edition of 1922 is where the directory finally speaks. Beside a photograph captioned Château Ferrière, 3e cru classé, Féret prints the first description of the estate the book had carried in 54 years of listing its rank, and it is not about wine at all:

This estate belonged in the middle of the 18th century to Gabriel Ferrière, royal broker at Bordeaux, Officer of the King's Hunts. He ceded it in 1777 to his first cousin, Gabriel Ferrière, bourgeois of Bordeaux, who, with his brother Jean, was imprisoned during the Terror. On the fall of Robespierre, Jean Ferrière was named mayor of Bordeaux (1795). Another brother, André Ferrière, was very popular in Bordeaux; he owed his escape from arrest to the energy of the people of the quarter, who, placing themselves in front of his door on the quai des Chartrons, declared that the first man to enter would have his head broken. Mr. Henri Ferrière sold this estate in 1914 to Mr. Armand Feuillerat, also the proprietor of Château Marquis-de-Terme, great classed growth of Margaux.

« Un autre frère, André Ferrière, était très populaire à Bordeaux, il dut de ne pas être arrêté à l'énergie des gens du quartier, qui, se plaçant devant sa porte (quai des Chartrons), déclarèrent que le premier qui entrerait aurait la tête cassée. »

Cocks and Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 9th edition, Bordeaux, 1922, pp. 140 to 141, note 1

It is the only moment in 54 years of Ferrière's entries when anybody in this story is in danger. It is the Terror. Two of the brothers are already in prison. A third, André, is at home on the quai des Chartrons when the men come for him, and the people of the quarter get to the door first and stand across it, and tell whoever is coming that the first man through will have his head broken. Nobody comes through.

The directory waited 54 years to describe Château Ferrière and then described the Ferrières, 8 years after the last of them had sold, and the one scene it gave the estate is a street in Bordeaux with a crowd across a doorway.

The long sleep

The sleep began with a lease. In 1952 the vines were leased to neighboring Lascombes, and the Ferrière bottled during the lease was made in small quantity, from grapes that did not come from the historic vineyard, for the specific purpose of maintaining the rights to the name.

There is exactly one measurement of that silence, and it comes from a direction nobody in Bordeaux was looking. In 1994 a pair of economists at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh, ran 29,911 lots of Médoc classed growths from 101 Christie's London sales, held between 1980 and 1992, through a price model. Their footnote 6 reads: "There are 60 Haut-Médoc Growth wines, but there were no observations for Château Desmirail and Château Ferrière, which are small vineyards, producing only 3,000 and 1,000 cases respectively." The authors give size as the reason, and it is the right one. But across 13 years and nearly 30,000 lots, not one bottle of Ferrière crossed the block, and the directory's line had never moved.

The Merlaut family bought the estate in 1988, and the lease formally ended in 1991. Bernadette Villars built a new winery. The first vintage of the reborn Château Ferrière was 1992. The lease had inverted the merchants' old arrangement. Under a monopoly the name stayed on wine from the classed vines and only the buyer changed. After 1952 the classed vines went into another estate's wine and the name went onto grapes from somewhere else. What the 2 arrangements have in common is the register. It followed the mark and asked nothing about the soil.

The verdict

A directory that carries a rank for 54 years without once describing the wine has kept a register of titles, and recorded no judgment about quality. Its own English edition of 1883 said as much beneath its copy of the Classification, noting that "for the last twenty-five years, many modifications of the grand growths of Medoc" called for the work to be revised, while going on reprinting. Registers of title outlast the things they describe, which is what a register is for, and a tasting note is a different kind of document.

Confirmed. The list can kill, and the list can wait. Ferrière slept for 40 years and woke up with its rank intact. The château could come back in 1992 because the thing the brokers had ranked in 1855 had never gone anywhere: a rank in this system attaches to a mark, and a mark is durable in a way that vines, families, and cellars are not. The brokers had priced wine and inspected no vineyard, so the rank never depended on the soil. The directory gave the estate no notice, no engraving, and no photograph until the family had been gone 8 years, so it never depended on a building either, and the literature that was supposed to supply a judgment of quality copied itself and recycled a pre-Classification vintage for 75 years. The crop itself belonged to a merchant in at least 9 vintages before the family sold. All the rank ever needed was to stay in print, and printing is the cheapest thing on that list.

The wine

Ferrière came back in 1992 and has been climbing since, which is the least surprising thing in this file: give a Margaux vineyard this small a proper cellar and its own team and there is no longer any reason for a book to be silent about the wine. It is farmed organically, certified in 2015, and biodynamically, certified in 2018, in the vineyard and the cellar both, under Claire Villars-Lurton, Bernadette Villars's daughter, who runs it alongside Château Haut-Bages Libéral in Pauillac.

The style is what people mean when they say Margaux, perfumed and fine-boned, capable of making bigger neighbors look overdressed, and the size of the place is part of why. Production is small and the wine is hard to find, which was true in 1867 as well, when Danflou reported the bottles already gone. Buy it when you see it. In 1868 the directory printed the name twice because it had nothing else to put on the line. It would have something now.

Chronology

Sources

Period sources, read in the original.

• André Jullien, Topographie de tous les vignobles connus, 3rd edition, Paris, 1832, pp. 180 to 181.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc et les autres vins rouges du département de la Gironde, 1st edition, Bordeaux, 1824, the classification.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1845, the classification.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1853, the classification.
• Pierre Biarnez, Les grands vins de Bordeaux : poëme, Paris, Plon Frères, 1849, p. 21.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux, ses environs et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, Bordeaux, Féret fils, 1850, p. 244.
• A. d'Armailhacq, La culture des vignes, la vinification et les vins dans le Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, p. 499.
• P. Gaubert, Étude sur les vins et les conserves, Paris, 1857, the awards of the 11th class at the Exposition Universelle of 1855.
• Thomas George Shaw, Wine, the Vine, and the Cellar, London, 1863, pp. 181 to 182.
• Alfred Danflou, Les grands crus bordelais : monographies et photographies des châteaux et vignobles, second series, Bordeaux, 1867, chapter 4 of the third growths.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1868, p. 113.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1874, p. 120.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 5th edition, Bordeaux, 1886, p. 150.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 6th edition, Bordeaux, 1893, p. 154.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 7th edition, Bordeaux, 1898, p. 158.
• Édouard Féret, Supplément à la 7e édition de Bordeaux et ses vins, Bordeaux, 1901, the harvests of 1896 to 1900, p. 13.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 9th edition, Bordeaux, 1922, pp. 140 to 142.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux and its Wines Classified in Order of Merit, 2nd English edition, Bordeaux, 1883, pp. 96 and 140.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux and its Wines Classed by Order of Merit, 3rd English edition, Bordeaux, 1899, p. 158.
• G.A.K., Clarets and Sauternes: Classed Growths of the Médoc and Other Famous Red and White Wines of the Gironde, London, 1920, chapter 32, pp. 106 to 108.

Modern scholarship.

• Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh, "Des enchères comme révélateurs du classement des vins. Les grands crus du Haut-Médoc", Journal de la Société de statistique de Paris, vol. 137, no. 2, 1996, pp. 19 to 49, the French version of their 1994 paper on Christie's auctions, note 6. Numdam
• Stephen Brook, The Complete Bordeaux, 4th edition, Mitchell Beazley, London, 2022, the Ferrière entry, for the estate's 20th century.

How this was checked

Every period quotation was read in the original text, in a private library of 244,000+ wine documents, the oldest from 1373. Where an English edition is quoted its wording is kept, spelling and all; the other translations from the French are mine, with the French beneath the lines that matter most so that you can check one against the other. If a page cited here does not say what I say it says, write to me at antonio@bordeauxreviews.com and I will correct it.

To cite this article: Antonio Assumpção, "Can a château come back from the dead?", Bordeaux Reviews, Château Case Files 04/70, 2026, https://bordeauxreviews.com/case-files/can-a-chateau-come-back-from-the-dead/.

Antonio "Guto" Assumpção stands at the intersection of law and wine. Admitted to practice law in Florida, New York, and Rio de Janeiro, he is also a French Wine Scholar and a Master of Bordeaux by the Wine Scholar Guild and holds a WSET Level 3 certification. Antonio has been studying, collecting, and tasting Bordeaux wines for the past 20 years, and his articles blend a detailed analysis with a connoisseur's insight into the world of wine. Follow him on Instagram at @BordeauxReviews.