Did the Revolution break up Léoville?

In 1805 an architect named Lataste drew a vineyard in Saint-Julien for its owners, and on his plan it became 3 lots. In the division that followed, the heirs fought over everything a shared house fights over, down to the right of way across the courtyard.

One sentence from the dispute survives in the modern history of the estate: "There could be no easement where there was only one master." It was written about a courtyard. It also describes the next 35 years, as one master became several.

The vineyard was Léoville, the largest in Saint-Julien. It is now 3 estates, Léoville Las Cases, Léoville Poyferré and Léoville Barton, and Las Cases says on its own website that the French Revolution broke it apart. The site tells the story in 2 sentences. "The estate was split up between 1826 and 1840 as a result of the French Revolution. (Expropriation of emigrants' property and constitution of egalitarian redistribution)."

Further on, Léoville Las Cases adds that it "was created, thanks to a kind of birthright, from 3/5 of the original estate and the heart of the domain." The first quotation blames the Revolution. The second credits a birthright, the very institution the Revolution set out to abolish.

So which broke up Léoville, the Revolution or the family? Both sentences can be tested against the record, and so can a question the site does not raise: if Léoville was 3 estates by 1840, why did the classification of 1855 still print one?

One name, four owners

The oldest witnesses write one name. A treatise on the vine published in Paris in 1801, 7 years after the Revolution seized part of the estate, placed the renowned wines of the Médoc in order down the river: "Calon, in Sainte-Estèphe; Lafitte and Latour, in Poillac; Léoville and Grau, in Saint-Julien." André Jullien, the Paris merchant who surveyed the world's vineyards in 1816, put one clos Léoville at the head of his second class.

The name was already covering more than one owner. In 1824 William Franck, a Bordeaux broker, printed a Saint-Julien table in his Traité sur les vins du Médoc that no later book repeats. It gives the old name once, "Léoville ou Labadie," and beside it a brace, the curly bracket the trade's clerks used to tie several owners to a single growth.

Inside the brace are 4 proprietors: De Lascazes, 80 to 100 tonneaux; D'Abadie, 40 to 50; Chevalier, 15 to 20; and Barton, with the smallest share. (A tonneau was 4 barrels, about 900 liters of wine.) Chevalier was one of the 2 men who bought the quarter confiscated in 1794, and 30 years on he still held a piece. Barton is already inside the enclos, the walled vineyard, 2 years before the purchase his family dates its Léoville from.

How 4 owners came to share one name is a story of a seizure and a law.

The quarter the Revolution took

The modern account of those holdings is Catherine di Costanzo's life of the last Marquis de Las Cases, published in 2024 and drawn from papers found at the château and from the departmental archives of the Gironde. The Las Cases came to the Médoc by a marriage into the d'Abbadie family in 1746; the d'Abbadie vineyard at Saint-Julien had taken the name Léoville earlier in the century. In 1768 Pierre Jean, marquis de Las Cases, inherited Léoville with his sister Jeanne.

Pierre Jean emigrated. In 1794 his share, a quarter of Léoville, was seized as the property of an émigré, then sold as national property to Monbalon and Chevalier. After further sales, Hugh Barton had bought the whole quarter by 1826, and there Léoville Barton begins.

The seizure is the Revolution's own act, documented and dated. It accounts for a quarter of the estate.

The shares the family settled

The rest of the story is older, and less revolutionary, than the site suggests. On di Costanzo's account the estate was already held in unequal shares before 1789: a quarter to the marquis, a quarter to his sister, and a half, "the rich half of the old family estate," to a d'Abbadie uncle.

What changed was the law under which those shares would pass. From 1794 the Revolution's law of 17 nivôse year II required equal shares among heirs. From 1804 the Civil Code did the same in its article 745: children inherit from their parents "par égales portions," in equal portions, without regard to sex or birth order. Lataste drew his 3 lots the year after the Code.

Then the marquis died, in 1815. His son Adolphe Stanislas recovered the d'Abbadie half, disinherited his sister Sidonie, and became sole owner of what would be Léoville Las Cases.

The final division, on the lines Lataste had drawn, came in 1840. The Cuvelier family, which has owned Léoville Poyferré since 1920, dates its estate's birth to that year: "Following various divisions and successions, Château Léoville Poyferré was born in 1840."

So the estate's 2 sentences fit together after all. The Revolution took one quarter by seizure and left behind a law of equal shares. The family then spent a generation working against that law in practice, and reunited the heart of the property in one pair of hands. The site calls the result a birthright.

That settles the owners. It does not settle the name.

The market names the pieces

The trade did not wait for the family. Franck's 2nd edition of 1845 still lists Lascaze, Barton and Poyféré de Cères each "at Léoville," one place. His price notes in the same volume have already split the name. For the vintage of 1844 he prints the sales by growth:

Saint-Julien. Léoville-Lascaze, Bergeron-Ducru, 2500 francs; Léoville-d'Abadie, Gruau-Larose, 1200.

There are 2 Léovilles on one line of a price list, and one sold at more than double the other. The brokers knew there was more than one wine under the name and called each after its owner, as the same list does with Rauzan-Segla and Lascombe-Hue in Margaux.

Armand d'Armailhacq, a Médoc proprietor writing in the classification year, gives 3 headings, "Léoville, de Lascases," "Léoville, Poiferé" and "Léoville, Barton." He says of Hugh Barton that he "acquired a part of the vines of Léoville and made of them a distinct wine, marked Léoville, Barton." Léoville had been selling as 3 wines, or at least as 2, for years before 1855.

The lists keep one Léoville

The lists that ranked the wines kept one name anyway. Charles Cocks's English guide of 1846 prints the second growths with one entry for Léoville and a brace holding its 3 owners, and his French edition of 1850 does the same, with a single entry in the index. Pierre Biarnez, the Bordeaux poet who set the growths in rhyme in 1849, settled the count in a quatrain:

The ducal coronet of three twin brothers / Shines at Saint-Julien with a royal splendor; / Léoville is revered as the equal of kings, / Whether it is called Barton, Lascase, or Poiféré.

On the next page he protests the rank the brokers had not yet written, I do not understand what clumsy expert could have classed Léoville among the seconds, and then puts Poyferré alone on the throne.

A handbook could print a divided estate when it chose to. Franck's classification of 1853 gives one heading, "Léoville, divisé en trois," and 3 lines beneath it: Lascazes 80 to 100 tonneaux, Poyféré de Cères 40 to 50, Barton 50 to 70. Gruaud-Larose on the same page is "divisé entre" its heirs.

In April 1855 the brokers of the Bordeaux exchange wrote the classification by hand for the Paris exhibition, and they wrote one Léoville. Their tableau reads "Léoville, St Julien," once, with a brace holding the Marquis de Las Cases, the Baron de Poyferré and Barton in the column for proprietors.

Directly above it, Rauzan is written once and bracketed into 2 named parts, Ségla and Gassies, in the column for the growths themselves. The brokers had a way of writing an estate as 2 growths, and they used it at Rauzan and not at Léoville.

The exhibition jury followed. Dr. Gaubert's report of 1857 lists among the second-class medals:

Messrs. de Lascazes, Poyféré and Barton, for their wine of Léoville.

« MM. de Lascazes, POYFÉRÉ et Barton, pour leur vin de Léoville. »

It is one award, to 3 men, for a wine in the singular. In 1863 Thomas George Shaw, a London wine merchant, still gave the classified Léoville one entry, with a brace, 3 proprietors, and their separate acreages beside it. Breaking the brace would take a publisher.

Three lines, and a promise to copy

In 1868 Édouard Féret, the Bordeaux publisher who had taken over Cocks's guide, brought out its 2nd edition. Across pages 89 and 90 he assured the reader that for the 5 classes of great growths "nous avons suivi textuellement le dernier document officiel établi par la Chambre syndicale des courtiers en 1855," we have followed textually the last official document drawn up by the brokers' syndical chamber in 1855.

On page 91, where the brokers had written Léoville once with a brace of owners, Féret prints 3 classified growths on 3 lines, Léoville-Lascases, Léoville-Poyféré and Léoville-Barton, each with its proprietor. It is the page on which Case 11 watched one Pichon become 2. A footnote supplies the description that later English writers repeat:

The whole domain of Léoville is one of the largest and oldest classed growths of the Médoc. It stretches from Beychevelle to the château La Tour. The portion belonging to the marquis de Lascases (descendant of the présidente de Léoville, who died in 1769) comprises half of the domain.

From 1868 on, the count never went back. From 1883 the directory quotes Biarnez's lines in a footnote, with an editor's aside that the poet's verve had made Poyferré a first growth. Its 9th edition, in 1922, repeats the assurance and the 3 Léovilles.

In 1920 an anonymous London author writing as G.A.K. treated the division as ordinary life: "an example has already been given of how, in the course of time, some of the larger and more famous of the Bordeaux vineyards become sub-divided, just as our own English estates become partitioned, or conversely, added to." There is no Revolution in his telling at all.

What the market made of it

With 3 Léovilles in the classification, the market went on pricing them apart, as it had in 1844. The economists Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh indexed 29,911 lots of classified Médoc sold at Christie's between 1980 and 1992 against Château du Tertre, a fifth growth, set at 100.

Their Saint-Julien figures put Léoville Las Cases at 202, Léoville Barton at 137 and Léoville Poyferré at 125, with Ducru-Beaucaillou at 201, Beychevelle 162, Gruaud-Larose 150 and Talbot 130. One enclos, one rank in 1855, and 3 prices, the highest 62% above the lowest.

The same paper notes that the classified growths advertise their standing on the label, "with the exception of Ducru-Beaucaillou and Léoville Las Cases." The estate that blames the Revolution for its split does not put the classification on its label at all.

Later re-runs of 1855 draw the line between the Léovilles in different places. When Liv-ex, the London exchange, sorted the classified growths by traded price in 2009, it kept Las Cases and Barton among the seconds and dropped Poyferré to the thirds.

Sorted by critics' scores, the order changes again. A team at Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research ran a regression of the vintages 1970 to 2005 in 2008; it lifted Las Cases to the firsts and left the other 2 where they were. And when one sociologist's interviews with the Bordeaux trade produced a list of super seconds, second growths that sell like firsts, Las Cases was on it and neither of the others was.

The owner of the quarter the Revolution sold defended the ranking anyway. Cyril Ray's book on the classification quotes Ronald Barton, who ran Léoville Barton and its neighbor Langoa, writing in 1963:

Basically, the classification remains sound, for it is based on the soil and the subsoil, and this has not changed. Given equal conditions a second can still, and will normally, produce a better wine than a third, a third than a fourth, and so on.

Ray also cites a classification list of 1827 then in Ronald Barton's possession. The man who owned a quarter of a divided enclos kept an old list and trusted the new one, because rank followed the soil.

The verdict

The claim on trial is that the Revolution broke up Léoville. The Revolution seized the first quarter in 1794 and sold it off, and that quarter became Léoville Barton. The rest of the estate was already held in unequal shares before 1789, and the family divided it under the Revolution's law of equal shares, on a plan of 1805 and in a final settlement of 1840; along the way a son recovered half the estate and disinherited a sister. By the 1840s the market was selling separate Léovilles at separate prices. The classification kept one Léoville until 1868, when a publisher who said he was copying the brokers printed 3.

Mostly true. The Revolution pleaded an alibi: the split finished 50 years after it ended. The court finds the alibi thin. It seized the first quarter, and it wrote the law that divided the rest. The finishing took other hands, and 50 years.

The wine

There are 3 wines now, on the land Féret described as running from Beychevelle to Latour. Léoville Las Cases belongs to Jean-Hubert Delon alone; its history page gives nearly 60 hectares for the old Clos, and its second wine is Le Petit Lion. Léoville Poyferré belongs to the Cuvelier family, with Sara Lecompte Cuvelier managing 80 hectares planted to 68% cabernet sauvignon, 24% merlot, 6% cabernet franc and 2% petit verdot, and a second wine called Pavillon de Léoville Poyferré. Léoville Barton, the quarter the Revolution sold, marks the bicentenary of its purchase this year and still has no château of its own, which is the subject of the next case.

The Léovilles have agreed on nothing since 1840 except the name, and even the name is set differently on each label. D'Armailhacq, in 1855, said of Poyferré that "the ground is the same as M. de Lascases's, and the wine enjoys the same favor." The ground is the same today. It has several masters now, and the market has divided the favor 3 ways.

Chronology

Sources

Period sources, read in the original.

• Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Jean-Baptiste Rozier, Antoine Parmentier and Louis Dussieux, Traité théorique et pratique sur la culture de la vigne, volume 1, Paris, 1801, the wines of the Médoc.
• Loi du 17 nivôse an II, on successions, 1794, and Code civil des Français, Paris, 1804, article 745.
• André Jullien, Topographie de tous les vignobles connus, 1st edition, Paris, 1816, Saint-Julien.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc et les autres vins rouges du département de la Gironde, 1st edition, Bordeaux, 1824, the Saint-Julien table.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1845, the Saint-Julien table, the prices of 1833 to 1840, and the sales of the 1844 vintage.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux: Its Wines, and the Claret Country, London, 1846, the second growths.
• Pierre Biarnez, Les grands vins de Bordeaux : poëme, Paris, Plon Frères, 1849, pp. 36 to 37.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux, ses environs et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, Bordeaux, Féret fils, 1850, the classification and the index.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1853, the table of second growths.
• A. d'Armailhacq, La culture des vignes, la vinification et les vins dans le Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, Saint-Julien.
• P. Gaubert, Étude sur les vins et les conserves, suivie du compte rendu de la séance de dégustation tenue par les membres de la 11e classe de l'Exposition universelle, Paris, 1857, the awards.
• Thomas George Shaw, Wine, the Vine, and the Cellar, London, 1863, the table of second growths.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1868, the note and table of the classification, pp. 89 to 91, and Saint-Julien.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux and its Wines Classified in Order of Merit, 2nd English edition, Bordeaux, 1883, Saint-Julien.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 6th edition, Bordeaux, 1893, Saint-Julien.
• G.A.K., Clarets and Sauternes: Classed Growths of the Médoc and Other Famous Red and White Wines of the Gironde, London, 1920, Léoville Las Cases.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 9th edition, Bordeaux, 1922, the official classification and its note.

Modern scholarship and the public record.

• Chambre syndicale des courtiers de commerce près la Bourse de Bordeaux, "Vins rouges classés du département de la Gironde," the tableau annexed to the letter of April 18, 1855, in the copy certified "pour copie conforme" and held by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce, read from photographs of its 5 pages.
• Catherine di Costanzo, "From Versailles to St Julien: the extraordinary life of Marquis de Las Cases 1782-1880," Inside Bordeaux, October 2024, translated from Les Cahiers Méduliens, no. 80, for the successions, the seizure of 1794, the shares, the 1805 plan and the easement dispute, the recovery of 1815, and the division of 1840.
• Cyril Ray, The Classification of 1855, 1974, for the list of 1827 and the article by Ronald Barton of 1963.
• 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 working paper Pricing Red Wines of Médoc Vintages from 1949 to 1989 at Christie's Auctions, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1995. Numdam
• Gary M. Thompson, Stephen A. Mutkoski, Youngran Bae, Liliana Ielacqua and Se Bum Oh, "An Analysis of Bordeaux Wine Ratings, 1970-2005: Implications for the Existing Classification of the Médoc and Graves," Cornell Hospitality Report, June 2008, Exhibit 12.
• Pierre-Marie Chauvin, "The Social Fabric of Prices: Institutional Factors and Reputation Work in the Bordeaux Wine Futures Campaign," economic sociology, the european electronic newsletter, vol. 15, no. 1, November 2013, note 10, for the super seconds.

The trade and the estates' own accounts.

• Château Léoville Las Cases, the history page of the estate's site, read September 20, 2026, and reproduced in the Wine Folly Bordeaux guide, for the 2 sentences quoted, the owner, the Clos, and the second wine. bordeaux.guides.winefolly.com
• Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux, the Château Léoville Poyferré page, for the Cuvelier family, the manager, the vineyard, the blend, the second wine, and the estate's sentence on its own birth. ugcb.net
• Decanter, 2009, the report on the Liv-ex reclassification by traded price. decanter.com

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, "Did the Revolution break up Léoville?", Bordeaux Reviews, Château Case Files 12/70, 2026, https://bordeauxreviews.com/case-files/did-the-revolution-break-up-leoville/.

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.