Was the Maharajah of Saint-Estèphe a fraud?

In 1843 a delegation from the national winegrowers' congress, meeting at Bordeaux that year, drove out to Saint-Estèphe and knocked on the door at Cos without having written ahead. The rapporteur was Guillory the elder, an agronomist who had come to look at a vineyard. He got something else, and he was honest enough to write down that it had worked on him:

As he had not been warned of our visit, he immediately gave some orders and asked us to wait until they were carried out. A quarter of an hour later the cellar was opened to us, and I confess to you, gentlemen, my astonishment was such that it contested with my admiration. A dazzling light flooded the enclosure we had entered; five candle chandeliers, hung from the vault, spread it in profusion on every side; a properly kept parquet floor covered the ground; the bins that held the bottles had the elegance and the richness of the shelves of a library; and the most sought-after drawing rooms present no greater luxury than the cellar where M. d'Estournel piles up with love his delicious wine of Cos.

Guillory aîné, report on the Congrès des vignerons français, Bordeaux, 1843, as reprinted in Alfred Danflou, Les grands crus bordelais, 1866

A man is caught unannounced by the most serious agricultural body in France, and he does not show them his vines. He sends the servants down to light the cellar.

That quarter of an hour is the earliest dated eyewitness account of the place I have found. It was written by a man who came to inspect a wine and went home describing the shelving. The prosecution could hardly ask for a better witness, which makes it odd that the defense has been quoting him ever since.

The host was not Médoc nobility. By the estate's own account, Louis-Gaspard d'Estournel inherited a stony hill facing Lafite in 1791 and spent 40 years building a vineyard on it, 14 hectares grown to 45. Instead of a château he put pagodas above his cellars, tiered towers in the manner of the temples of the East.

The Bordeaux trade found a word for him: nabob. Posterity softened it to the Maharajah of Saint-Estèphe, a title that appears in no book of his lifetime I have read, and means the same thing.

The charge that came with the nickname has not changed since 1849. He was a showman who sold towers instead of wine and decorated his way into a class he had not earned. He also spent himself into ruin doing it.

The class is the heart of it. In 1855 Cos was ranked a Second Growth, in a list the Bordeaux brokers drew up from the prices the wines had fetched. So the question is narrower than fraud. Did the pagodas buy Cos its rank? The trade's books were printing their answers while d'Estournel was alive, and they did not all print the same one.

Two or three rectifications

The first of those books was written by a man who meant to change nothing. William Franck, a Bordeaux merchant who had spent his working life in the wine trade, published a handbook of the Médoc in 1824, with a ranking of the classed growths at the back. He put Cos among the Third Growths, at 1,500 to 1,800 francs the tun, the Bordeaux tonneau of 4 barrels, in years when the Firsts fetched 2,300 to 2,400.

In 1845 he reissued the book and told his readers exactly what he had done to the ranking. He promised "no other change than two or three rectifications become necessary, and the substitution of the names of some proprietors who have come to replace those of 1824."

One of the two or three was Cos. His Seconds gained exactly one name, and it was Cos-Destournel, listed with Gruau-la-Rose, Léoville, Mouton-Thuret, and Rauzan.

Franck did not rank the growths inside the class, because doing so, he wrote, "would be too delicate and too impracticable a task for us to dare to attempt it." He moved one wine up and called it a rectification, 10 years before the brokers sat down.

The Englishman who said no

The trade did not follow him. The man arguing back was Charles Cocks, the Englishman whose guide to the claret country grew into the directory that still carries his name.

In 1846, in London, Cocks had Franck's new edition open in front of him, and cited it by page in a footnote. He ranked the Médoc himself and left Cos among the Thirds, at 72 pounds the tun when the Firsts sold at 96. He told his readers why: Saint-Estèphe has "Cos-Destournel, which claims to be a second cru, though it is still more contested than Pichon."

In 1850, in Bordeaux, he did it again. His Thirds open with Cos-Destournel, in a class he prices "about 300 francs below the price of the Seconds," and his Seconds include no Saint-Estèphe wine at all. On another page of the same book he calls it "the finest property of this excellent commune." Whatever Franck had done, Cocks was not having it, and he said so in 2 languages.

So for 10 years the 2 reference books of the trade disagreed about Cos in print. Franck held his line in his 1853 edition, "when the Firsts sell at 2,400 francs, the Seconds sell at 2,100 to 2,050," with Cos among them.

The clearest account of what had been going on comes from Armand d'Armailhacq, a Médoc proprietor whose treatise on vine-growing appeared in 1855. He puts 2 facts in one sentence:

This growth, to which the Bordeaux trade long contested the rank of second great wines, is highly esteemed in India, where it enjoys great favor.

« Ce crû, auquel le commerce de Bordeaux a longtemps contesté le rang des seconds grands vins, est très-estimé dans l'Inde, où il jouit d'une grande faveur. »

A. d'Armailhacq, La culture des vignes, la vinification et les vins dans le Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, p. 479

Read the second half again. The trade fought the rank at home while the wine was being paid for abroad.

The nabobs

D'Estournel had found his buyers an ocean away. Charles Saint-Amant, a Bordeaux writer whose Promenade en Médoc also appeared in 1855, had no affection for him. He had none for his gate either, which he found "a theatrical decoration," painted canvas on wood by the look of it, fronting sheds and stables. There was no master's house at Cos; the owner had lived at Pomys nearby.

In the same passage Saint-Amant records where the wine went. In the great Indies, he wrote, "that mark is preferred to any other," and the nabobs "will drink nothing but Cos-Destournel." Then comes the sentence that matters:

That outlet suffices to sell the crops, which the Bordeaux trade seeks only when it absolutely needs the mark for its shipments to Calcutta and Madras.

« Ce débouché suffit à l'écoulement des récoltes, que le commerce bordelais ne recherche que lorsqu'il a absolument besoin de la marque pour ses expéditions à Calcutta et à Madras. »

Charles Saint-Amant, Le vin de Bordeaux : promenade en Médoc, 1855, p. 105

Saint-Amant disliked the man and has explained the mechanism without meaning to. A Bordeaux house that buys a wine only when it needs the mark for a shipment to Calcutta is not buying it for its own pleasure. The brokers of 1855 never asked why a price was paid, only what it was.

He offered 2 guesses at why India liked it, and the first was that "its plants of the Syrras of the Hermitage were to the taste of the nabobs." (The second was a lucky vintage.) The syrah, at least, is real. D'Armailhacq, arguing that the varieties of the Rhône could improve the Médoc, offers Cos as his proof, "which has acquired much more reputation since a certain quantity of syrras was planted there." He repeated it in 1867 with the note that "this variety deserves to be propagated." The leading viticultural authority of the day put the rise of Cos down to a planting decision.

The estate's favorite witness wrote in 1866. Alfred Danflou, a Bordeaux writer who published monographs on the great estates that year, is the source for most of what Cos says about itself today. He is also the writer who reprinted Guillory's visit to the lit cellar, which is probably how the prosecution's best witness came to be quoted by the defense.

Danflou asked the question the buildings have been asked ever since, whether they were "the palace of a nabob exiled in our West, or a temple of Brahma." His answer: "A little from taste, and a little from gratitude." In his words, "M. d'Estournel found advantageous outlets at Calcutta, at Bombay, and the English officers granted his wines a preference they still enjoy."

His other detail is a name. "Throughout Europe, Cos-d'Estournel, called retour de l'Inde, is in great favor with the finest palates." Retour de l'Inde, returned from India, was a selling name: bottles that had made the round voyage sold at a premium, because the age believed the crossing improved the wine.

That is probably the readiest explanation of why Bordeaux held the rank back for so long. A reputation made in Calcutta, and perhaps made by the sea, was not obviously a verdict on the wine in the brokers' ledgers.

Danflou adds the money, and it is the thing the brokers cared about. "For several years," he writes, "the wines of Cos have sometimes sold as dear as those of Rauzan and Léoville."

The prosecution's own witness

The charge itself was written down in 1849, in verse. Pierre Biarnez's Les grands vins de Bordeaux is a tour of the Médoc in rhyming couplets, published in Paris, and it reaches Saint-Estèphe on page 46:

Saint-Estèphe still offers, across its wide surface, beside high bourgeois growths, three crus of noble race. Proud to be the nabobs' supreme delight, Cos-Destournel first claims to walk the equal of our best Seconds, though it would be hard for it to equal Rauzan, Mouton and Léoville. After those, one may put it in the second rank, provided it is delivered to us in bottle, honest; for if it is altered by some impure blend, we watch it leave for the Ganges without regret. In vain do minarets, massed on its slopes, parade their oriental faces to the sky. Such artifice leaves us unmoved: we need great wines, not great buildings.

« En vain des minarets, groupés sur ses coteaux, / Étalent jusqu'aux cieux leurs fronts orientaux, / Nous sommes peu touchés de pareils artifices ; / Il nous faut de grands vins, non de grands édifices. »

Pierre Biarnez, Les grands vins de Bordeaux : poëme, Paris, Plon Frères, 1849, p. 46

The last line is the one everybody quotes, and I understand why; it is a good line. But the whole passage is in print, and in its fifth line the prosecution concedes the rank. "One may put it in the second rank." Biarnez grants Cos the class 6 years before the brokers ruled on it, in the same breath in which he refuses to forgive the buildings.

He was not an evenhanded critic, either. One page earlier he had argued that Mouton belonged among the Firsts. He was willing to move one estate up and determined to hold another in place, and the difference between them was architecture.

His poem is also, as far as I can find, the earliest description of the towers in print. No source read for this file says when they were built.

The same commune offers a control. Montrose, Saint-Estèphe's other Second Growth of 1855, was a vineyard cut from woodland whose reputation Saint-Amant dates only from 1834. Franck had it among the Thirds in 1845 and again in 1853, with the note that it "often sells as a Second." Danflou in 1867 found there a house "dainty as an Italian villa" and no towers at all.

Montrose reached the second class 10 years after Cos, with a villa where Cos had pagodas. In this commune, in these years, the class could be reached without building anything.

He lost it

In 1852 the vineyard changed hands. Franck's 1853 edition prints the sale in its table: Cos-d'Estournel, Saint-Estèphe, 1,150,000 francs, to M. Martyns of London. The buyer was Charles Cecil Martyn, an English politician.

The reason for the sale comes from 2 witnesses, and they do not agree. Saint-Amant blames the man: "always disposed to buy and rarely to sell, this maniacal old man was forever at his expedients," impoverishing himself each year "to pay the more or less usurious interest on the loans he was obliged to bear."

Danflou blames the market: "Who in Bordeaux does not know that for several years the greatest wines suffered on every market a depreciation ruinous for the proprietors, several of whom then met with disaster? M. d'Estournel was among them."

On one thing they agree: he was buying vineyard to the end. D'Armailhacq records that neighboring Cos-Labory "was bought by M. d'Estournel a short time before his death," and Saint-Amant has Martyn, "enormously rich," taking it at auction with the rest.

D'Estournel died in 1853, at 91 by the estate's account. That year Franck's third edition carried the entry as 3 words of bookkeeping: Cos-Destournel, aujourd'hui Martyns. Cos-Destournel, today Martyn's.

In 1855 the brokers of the Chambre syndicale des courtiers, the union that kept the trade's sale books, drew up the ranking for Napoleon III's Exposition Universelle in Paris that became the 1855 Classification. They tasted nothing and visited nobody. They sorted the growths by the average price each had fetched over years, and Cos went into the second class, beside Rauzan and Léoville.

The brokers confirmed the Second Growth for a wine that no longer belonged to the man who had made it. At the Exposition in Paris the jury's second-class medal for Cos-d'Estournel was listed, in the directory's own roll of awards, under a single name: Martyn.

The verdict

False. India paid before Bordeaux bowed. The brokers priced the wine beside Rauzan and Léoville, and the pagodas were a thank-you note written in stone. Cos was placed with the Second Growths in the trade's own handbook in 1845 by a compiler who had meant to change nothing; the wine was selling to India by name while the Bordeaux trade, in d'Armailhacq's words, was still contesting the rank; and Biarnez, the one contemporary who put the accusation in print, granted Cos the second rank 4 lines before he mocked the towers. The part of the charge the mockers had right is showmanship, and the defense concedes it. D'Estournel sold a wine with a story attached, under a name that carried a premium on its own, and the estate trades on it still. He also lost the property. What the showmanship did not do is buy the rank, because the rank was a price, and the price was being paid in Calcutta.

The trade directory that Cocks began took 72 years to mention the buildings in words. In 1922 Cocks and Féret's ninth edition put 6 lines of verse into the Cos entry, on page 259, borrowed from "the great poet of the wines of the Gironde, Biarnez," and noted that it was quoting them "with a few modifications." Biarnez had written that in vain do these minarets parade their oriental faces to the sky. The 1922 edition prints: with minarets massed on its slopes, raising its oriental faces to the heavens, proud to be the nabobs' supreme delight, here is Cos d'Estournel, which can walk the equal of all the greatest classed growths of the Gironde. The poem written to convict the estate had been edited into its advertisement, in the trade's own reference book, 73 years later.

The wine

Cos sells today in the group the trade calls the Super Seconds, a merchants' phrase and not a rank, since the Classification has never ordered estates inside a tier. The house style is the most recognizable in Saint-Estèphe: dense, worked, unmistakably built rather than merely made. Beside Montrose on the same gravel it is the upholstered one, and which of the two you reach for says more about you than about either wine. The 2020, which I wrote up in January 2026 from the collector bottling with the pagodas printed in gold on the glass, is that argument at its best, all lift and precision, polished but never heavy. Down by the punt the bottle says C'était Cos sinon rien. Cos or nothing. The mockers of 1849 would have recognized the confidence.

Chronology

Sources

Period sources, read in the original.

• 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 preamble to the classification and the second growths.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1853, the classification and the table of estate sales.
• Guillory aîné, Congrès des vignerons français, the report of the second session, held at Bordeaux in 1843, the visit to Cos, as reprinted by Danflou in 1866.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux: Its Wines, and the Claret Country, London, 1846, pp. 191 to 196.
• Pierre Biarnez, Les grands vins de Bordeaux : poëme, Paris, Plon Frères, 1849, pp. 45 to 46.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux, ses environs et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, Bordeaux, Féret fils, 1850, pp. 221 and 242 to 243.
• A. d'Armailhacq, La culture des vignes, la vinification et les vins dans le Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, pp. 69 and 479.
• A. d'Armailhacq, De la culture des vignes, de la vinification et des vins dans le Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, Chaumas, 1867, p. 70.
• Charles Saint-Amant, Le vin de Bordeaux : promenade en Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, pp. 104 to 105.
• Alfred Danflou, Les grands crus bordelais : monographies et photographies des châteaux et vignobles, first series, Bordeaux, 1866, the Cos-d'Estournel monograph; the Montrose monograph in the 1867 series.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1874, p. 73.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 5th edition, Bordeaux, 1886, p. 551, the awards of 1855.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 9th edition, Bordeaux, 1922, p. 259.

The estate's own account, and the author's own note.

• Château Cos d'Estournel, the estate's published history, for the inheritance of 1791 and the death of Louis-Gaspard d'Estournel in 1853, at 91.
• Antonio Assumpção, note on Cos d'Estournel 2020, Instagram, January 21, 2026. @BordeauxReviews

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, "Was the Maharajah of Saint-Estèphe a fraud?", Bordeaux Reviews, Château Case Files 02/70, 2026, https://bordeauxreviews.com/case-files/was-the-maharajah-of-saint-estephe-a-fraud/.

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.