Is there a second Margaux?

In the sales of the 1844 vintage, which William Franck itemized name by name for Margaux, the line reads: "Rauzan-Ségla and Lascombe-Hue, 2,500 fr.; Durfort-de Vivens, 2,650." Franck's Traité sur les vins du Médoc, the Bordeaux wine merchant's book of prices and rankings, sat on the desk of the whole Bordeaux trade. On the same page, in parentheses, he notes that, at 2,100 francs the tonneau (a Bordeaux tonneau is 4 barrels, about 900 liters), the crops of Château Margaux itself had been sold on a 9-year contract from the 1844 vintage.

A contract price and a spot price are not the same thing, and I do not pretend they are. But in the trade's own book, in 1845, Durfort was fetching more money than Château Margaux.

Earlier in the same volume, Franck's ranking put Durfort among the fourth growths, 3 classes below Château Margaux. And in the auction rooms of the 1980s it sold like a fifth growth.

So which was it? Margaux has told one story about this vineyard for as long as there have been books: just behind the great château stood a wine so close in breed that nobody could separate them. The record supports it more than once. It also carries, in the same decades and sometimes in the same book, the opposite: that the name was all that was left.

One vineyard is meant throughout: the books spell it Durfort, Durfort-Vivens, Vivens-Durfort, or Durfort-Puységur after the owner of the day.

A practiced palate can tell them apart

The reputation is old. Franck's own table of prices, headed with the good years "of 1745, etc.," puts Durfort among the seconds of Margaux. Thomas Jefferson toured the Médoc in 1787 as the American minister to France. He put 4 wines in his first rank, Margaux, Latour, Lafite, and Haut-Brion, and 5 in his second, standing immediately behind them: Rauzan, Léoville, Larose, Kirwan, and "Dufort." Mouton he put in his third.

When he wrote out a buying memorandum for a Philadelphia merchant in 1793, the 4 famous crops cost 3 livres a bottle old, and "the wines of Dabbadie, la Rose, Quirouen and Durfort which are reckoned as good as Madame de Rozan's" cost 40 sous.

In 1846 Charles Cocks, the Englishman whose guide to the claret country grew into the directory that carries his name, gave Margaux "three second crus, Rauzan, Durfort, and Lascombe," and with one exception, which comes after Jullien, every other book on the record has it a second.

The line that made the legend came from the outsider with the widest view. André Jullien was a Paris wine merchant whose Topographie de tous les vignobles connus set out to rank every vineyard on earth. In the 3rd edition of 1832 he named Margaux's 3 seconds, Rauzan, Durfort, and Lascombe, and wrote:

The wines of these three growths share all the qualities of Château-Margaux, and differ from it only by nuances that untrained palates can scarcely distinguish.

« Les vins de ces trois crus participent de toutes les qualités de ceux du Château-Margaux et n'en diffèrent que par des nuances que les palais peu exercés distinguent difficilement. »

André Jullien, Topographie de tous les vignobles connus, 3rd edition, Paris, 1832

The sentence is narrower than the legend. Jullien does not say Durfort is Margaux's twin. He says all three of the commune's seconds are, and that a practiced palate can tell them apart. That is the claim on trial, and the century that followed spent its books arguing about it.

A merchant's fourth, priced like a second

The exception was the handbook on every merchant's desk. In the 2nd edition of 1845 Franck reprinted the ranking he had drawn up in 1824, with, he said, only "two or three rectifications." Durfort is in that book, under the Vicomte de Vivens, and it is among the fourth growths, below Lascombe, which he had among the thirds. The trade's own reference work had Durfort 2 classes under the rank the brokers would give it 10 years later.

Then turn to the back of the same volume, where Franck sets down what the wines had actually fetched. The 1844 sales were no one-off. In his table of the vintages of the 1830s Durfort sells at 1,200 and 1,400 francs the tonneau, against 800 and 1,200 for Rauzan-Ségla and 900 for Lascombe. By his own figures, his fourth growth was outselling his second, Rauzan-Ségla, and his third, Lascombe.

Armand d'Armailhacq, a Médoc proprietor finishing a treatise on the vine, remembered the 1844 vintage 10 years later from the other side of the counter. Durfort, he wrote, "is classed among the seconds; and in 1844 it sold the dearest of all; it fetched 2,600 fr."

In 1853 Franck brought out his 3rd edition and this time placed Durfort among the seconds, at 30 to 35 tonneaux. Whatever the 1844 prices had told him, the list caught up 9 years later. The brokers of the Chambre syndicale des courtiers, 2 years later, drawing up the ranking for Napoleon III's Exposition Universelle in Paris that became the 1855 Classification, wrote Durfort among the Second Growths. At the Exposition itself the jury gave the estate, under the Comte de Puységur, one of the second-class medals that went to the seconds, on the same list as Mouton and Cos.

Weighed against Rauzan, not Margaux

By then the complaint was already 6 years old. Pierre Biarnez, whom the trade's directory would later call the poet of the wines of Bordeaux, took the Médoc estate by estate in rhyming couplets in 1849, and he gave Durfort 16 lines. They begin by granting the rank and then take everything else away:

Durfort too claims, in its extreme pride, / To wear a second growth's pompous diadem. / I do not contest its rank, its quality; / The granite of its flank proves its dignity: / But the greater a name, the more it obliges us, / And Vesta's flame dies when it is neglected. / The indolent possessor of this precious soil / Languishes in cowardly ease under other skies, / Without suspecting that even a rich nature / Smiles only on the work of wise cultivation. / So old Durfort's brilliance has gone, / And if it still keeps the rank of second growth, / It has nothing left of the name but the useless prestige; / It has not the liquor the gourmet demands, / Nor that divine perfume, that seductive sugar, / That lightness of its neighbor Rauzan.

« Aussi du vieux Durfort l'éclat a disparu, / Et, s'il conserve encor le rang de second cru, / Il n'a plus que du nom l'inutile prestige. »

Pierre Biarnez, Les grands vins de Bordeaux : poëme, Paris, Plon Frères, 1849, pp. 19 to 20

The charge is worth stating exactly. The soil passes, since the granite of its flank proves its dignity. The rank passes, since he does not contest it. The owner lives elsewhere and lets the place run down, and the wine lacks the lightness of the vineyard next door. The twin Biarnez holds up is Rauzan, not Margaux.

In 1855 Charles Saint-Amant, a Bordeaux writer walking the Médoc for a general reader, put Durfort where it stood in the glass, and admitted defeat: "Around the Château, how many other great growths, though classed in the second and third rank! The two Rauzans walk as the Château's equals." And then: "Durfort-Puységur yields nothing to its two neighbors, the Rauzans. It is a rivalry to confound the taster and drive him to despair." That is the legend in its full form: Durfort level with the Rauzans, the Rauzans level with the Château.

D'Armailhacq, the same year, put the vineyard on the map in one sentence. The growth, "formerly Montbrison, belonging to M. de Puységur," stood "on the Bordeaux road, at the edge of Margaux," 32 hectares of vines "situated in the middle of those of Rauzan and of the château," making about 45 tonneaux a year. That map explains how Biarnez and Saint-Amant could both be right about the same vines: they had Rauzan on one side and the Château on the other.

Alfred Danflou, whose illustrated survey of the great estates came out in 1867 and gives Durfort a chapter of its own, took Biarnez's charge seriously enough to answer it line by line. Several Girondin enologists, he admits, "claim that Durfort, where gravel dominates, has lost much for some time, because cultivation there is not as careful as it once was," and Biarnez "above all shows himself very severe." Then he names the defense: "Everyone remembers the exceptional success of the Durfort 1841, 1847, and 1848. The remainder of the last was sold not long ago, at Bordeaux, at auction, at 27 francs 50 the bottle."

He had visited, and he protests "against the accusations of degeneracy brought against this growth so justly famous." The new owners, Richier and de La Mare, who had bought the estate from Puységur in 1866, would restore "the finesse and the energy which were its distinctive characters." Vivens-Durfort, he writes, "has already reconquered its ancient glory." Danflou's chapter has the shape every later defense of Durfort would take: a great vintage remembered, a sale at auction to prove it, a decline admitted, a new owner promised.

The directory never wrote the twin

From 1868 the directory of Cocks and Féret kept the register, and for 54 years it carried the estate as a second growth with a stock description. The 3rd edition of 1874 gives the wine "great delicacy and the suave bouquet of the great wines of Margaux," a fine color, a long life, every vine on iron wire, only the fine varieties admitted. The English edition of 1883 keeps it to a sentence: "Its wines have great delicacy and bouquet, as the great wines of Margaux." As the great wines of Margaux, not as Château Margaux. The directory, which praised freely, never once wrote the twin.

What it recorded instead was the proprietor, and the proprietor kept changing. Counting Puységur's sale in 1866, the estate changed hands 4 times in 30 years, ending in 1895 with Gabriel Delor, a noted Bordeaux merchant, whose name is still on the entry in 1922.

The harvest moved as much as the owners. The 5 vintages from 1896 to 1900 came in at 80, 21, 30, 50, and 97 tonneaux. A second growth that changed hands 4 times in 30 years and swung between 21 and 97 tonneaux was a vineyard nobody was leaving alone, and nobody was confusing it with the estate over the wall, whose crop ran to 100 tonneaux in 1846 and whose proprietor's name did not change for 43 years at a stretch.

Inside Margaux's cellars

Then the twin disappeared into its sibling. In 1937 the Ginestets, the owners of Château Margaux, bought Durfort outright, through the company that held Margaux itself. Durfort's grapes went into Margaux's cellars, mostly for its second wine. For the most part, the second Margaux was now Margaux's second wine.

For a quarter of a century there was no Durfort to tell from Margaux, because there was no Durfort. The old claim had come true, and it meant nothing.

The way back took longer than the way in. Lucien Lurton bought the property in his own name in 1961 and began to win it back. In 1992 he divided his 10 estates among his 10 children and Durfort went to Gonzague. Until 1995 half the crop was still vinified at his brother's Brane-Cantenac, and that year the new winery was begun. Only then, 58 years after the purchase, did the estate stand fully on its own feet, with its own cellar and its own label.

The market had noticed the absence before the family closed it. In 1994 Albert Di Vittorio and Victor Ginsburgh, 2 economists at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, ran 29,911 lots of classified Médoc from 101 Christie's London sales, held between 1980 and 1992, through a price model. Durfort-Vivens was in the sample, barely. In the appendix where they estimate each first and second growth on its own, a footnote against the name reads: "There were only 25 lots sold; this is not enough to run a regression." Their price index for the commune sets Château du Tertre, a fifth growth, at 100. Château Margaux comes out at 371, Palmer at 263, Brane-Cantenac at 126, Rausan-Ségla at 114, Lascombes at 113, Rauzan-Gassies at 106, and Durfort-Vivens at 101. The wine that had sold above Château Margaux's contract price in 1844 was now priced below every other second growth on that list. In the auction rooms of the 1980s the second Margaux sold at the price of a fifth growth, and a quarter of the price of the first.

In 2009 Gonzague Lurton began farming biodynamically, and in 2016 Durfort became the first classified growth of Margaux certified organic and biodynamic. The estate farms 65 hectares across Margaux, Cantenac, Soussans, and Arsac, twice the 32 d'Armailhacq walked in 1855. The complaint of 1849 was an absentee owner and neglected vines. The answer of 2016 is an owner in the vines every day. The question the books argued about is open again, on different ground.

The verdict

Mixed. The complaint is as old as the rank. For 2 centuries Durfort has carried a Second Growth's name and a question mark's price, and the books have argued all the while. This court keeps a word for claims like that.

Jefferson put it in his second rank and Mouton in his third. Jullien said an untrained palate could not tell the commune's seconds from the Château; Franck, in Bordeaux, kept it among the fourths in 1845 while his own table showed it outselling the seconds. Biarnez granted the rank and denied the wine. The brokers wrote it a second, and Saint-Amant put it level with the Rauzans and the Rauzans level with the Château. Danflou wrote the defense every later owner has had to write again, and the auction rooms of the 1980s priced the name as a fifth. Not one of those verdicts is wrong about its own decade, and no two of them agree. A claim that is true in one age and false in the next does not get CONFIRMED or FALSE from this court.

What is not mixed is the mechanism, and it is the same one that runs through all 10 cases of this volume. Neither the rank nor the name ever moved. What moved was everything the rank was supposed to stand for: the owner, the care, the hectares, the cellar, the price, and for a generation the wine itself. Margaux never stopped being Margaux, as the skeptics rightly say. Durfort spent 200 years being asked whether it was.

The wine

Durfort today is the classified Margaux that has changed most since 2009, and the change is the point. Under Gonzague Lurton the estate picks earlier and extracts less. The result since the early 2010s has been a wine of perfume and lift where the old Durfort was solid and a little dull: bright red fruit, fine tannin, a floral edge, and a lightness on the palate that the biodynamic converts of the Médoc have made into a house style. The neighbors are still Rauzan on one side and the Château on the other, and the wine is now the most obviously different of the three, which after 2 centuries of books may be the most interesting thing about it. Buy the recent vintages, drink them younger than you would a Rauzan-Ségla, and do not go looking for the second Margaux in the glass, because that is the one thing the estate has stopped trying to be. One footnote for readers of Case 04: Gonzague Lurton is married to Claire Villars-Lurton of Ferrière, so the 2 Margaux growths in these files that came back from the longest silences are farmed from one household.

Chronology

Sources

Period sources, read in the original.

• Thomas Jefferson, "Memorandum to Henry Sheaff", after February 20, 1793, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 27, Founders Online, for the 4 famous crops at 3 livres and the second wines at 40 sous.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc et les autres vins rouges du département de la Gironde, 1st edition, Bordeaux, 1824, the Margaux table and the index of fourth growths.
• André Jullien, Topographie de tous les vignobles connus, 3rd edition, Paris, 1832, the second growths of the Médoc.
• Cyrus Redding, A History and Description of Modern Wines, London, 1833, the table of Médoc prices as sold new by the growers.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1845, the classification, the Margaux table, the table of quantities and prices for the 1830s, the sales of 1844, and the table of prices since 1745.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux: Its Wines, and the Claret Country, London, 1846, p. 161.
• Pierre Biarnez, Les grands vins de Bordeaux : poëme, Paris, Plon Frères, 1849, pp. 19 to 20.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux, ses environs et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, Bordeaux, Féret fils, 1850, pp. 203 and 242 to 243.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1853, the classification and the Margaux table.
• A. d'Armailhacq, La culture des vignes, la vinification et les vins dans le Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, pp. 499 and 520.
• Charles Saint-Amant, Le vin de Bordeaux : promenade en Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, pp. 61 to 62.
• Thomas George Shaw, Wine, the Vine, and the Cellar, London, 1863, p. 181.
• Alfred Danflou, Les grands crus bordelais : monographies et photographies des châteaux et vignobles, second series, Bordeaux, 1867, chapter X of the second growths, Château-Vivens-Durfort.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1868, Margaux.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1874, p. 118 and its note on Durfort-Vivens.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux and its Wines Classified in Order of Merit, 2nd English edition, Bordeaux, 1883, pp. 140 to 141.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 5th edition, Bordeaux, 1886, p. 148, and p. 551 for the awards of 1855.
• 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. 157.
• Édouard Féret, Supplément à la 7e édition de Bordeaux et ses vins, Bordeaux, 1901, the harvests of 1896 to 1900.
• G.A.K., Clarets and Sauternes: Classed Growths of the Médoc and Other Famous Red and White Wines of the Gironde, London, 1920, the Château Durfort-Vivens chapter, p. 41.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 9th edition, Bordeaux, 1922, p. 137.

Modern scholarship.

• Stefan K. Estreicher, "Wine and France: A Brief History", European Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 2023, p. 138, for Jefferson's ranking of 1787. Open access. Cambridge Core
• 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, November 1994, revised April 1995, Table 7 and Appendix Table A1. Numdam
• Stephen Brook, The Complete Bordeaux, 4th edition, Mitchell Beazley, London, 2022, the Durfort-Vivens entry, for the Ginestet purchase, the grapes in Margaux's second wine, Lucien Lurton, and the half crop at Brane-Cantenac until 1995.
• Jane Anson, "Chateau Durfort-Vivens", Decanter China, July 10, 2013, for the 1937 company and its shareholders, 1961, 1992, and the winery of 1995. decanterchina.com

The estate's own account.

• G&C Lurton, the Château Durfort-Vivens page, for the Durfort de Duras family, 1824, 1961, 1992, biodynamics from 2009, the certifications of 2016, and the 65 hectares. gc-lurton-estates.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, "Is there a second Margaux?", Bordeaux Reviews, Château Case Files 10/70, 2026, https://bordeauxreviews.com/case-files/is-there-a-second-margaux/.

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.