Who said 'my heart is at Calon'?

In 1736 the first wines of Lafite and Latour sold new at 2,000 livres. The figure is in a tax file. Their owner had contested his tax and filed his harvests, costs and prices to prove his case, and the royal intendant kept the file on the Ségur estates. In 1892 the historian Théophile Malvezin drew on that file, now in the departmental archives of the Gironde. He named the owner "M. Alexandre de Ségur, président à mortier au Parlement de Bordeaux," a senior judge of the province's high court.

Calon is not in the file.

That absence matters because of a sentence every lover of claret knows, and most can say in French: « Je fais du vin à Lafite et à Latour, mais mon cœur est à Calon. » I make wine at Lafite and at Latour, but my heart is at Calon. It is credited to Nicolas-Alexandre, marquis de Ségur, who owned at one time or another the greatest vineyards of the Médoc and died in 1755. It is the sentence behind the heart on the label of Château Calon-Ségur in Saint-Estèphe.

The estate tells it on its site as 18th-century history. It dates the heart in 2 places: engraved on the façade of the chai, its wine cellar, in the 19th century, and on the label "from the beginning of the 20th century, when the first labels were created."

The people who wrote about Calon in his century and the next left plenty on paper: prices, rankings, a poem, 2 detailed visits. Who heard the marquis say it?

Saint-Estèphe's top price, in the marquis's time

William Franck's Traité sur les vins du Médoc, the Bordeaux wine merchant's book of prices and rankings, served the trade for a generation from its first edition of 1824. It includes a retrospective table of red-wine prices "in the good years of 1745, etc.," commune by commune, from sources his 1845 edition calls "the most trustworthy" without naming them. It is a memory of the marquis's own decade, set down 79 years later, and it gives Saint-Estèphe one line:

SAINT-ESTÈPHE. First growth, Segur-Callon, from 800 to 1,000 livres the tonneau.

« SAINT-ESTÈPHE. Premier cru, Segur-Callon, de 800 à 1000 liv. le tonneau. »

On the same pages, Pauillac's first growth is Lafite at 1,500 to 1,800 livres. Latour and Château Margaux stand at the same. Léoville, the table's first growth in Saint-Julien, is priced with Calon at 800 to 1,000. The livre was the money the franc replaced at nearly the same value, and the prices are by the tonneau (a Bordeaux tonneau is 4 barrels, about 900 liters). Franck reprinted the table, reformatted but with the same prices, in 1845 and 1853.

For Lafite and Latour, the tax file is the contemporary check, and it agrees. The owner's first wines from the 2 estates sold new at 1,600 to 2,000 livres between 1736 and 1744, and Lafite alone fetched 1,900 in 1749 and 1750.

Together, the retrospective and the archive say 2 things. Calon carried its commune's top price in the marquis's time, the same as Léoville's, and it carried Ségur's name in front of its own, so the affection in the sentence is not absurd. But the man who supposedly gave Calon his heart was getting nearly twice the price per tonneau for the wine he made at Lafite and Latour. If he said the sentence, he said it against his own accounts, which is much of what makes it such a good sentence.

The 19th century's historian of the estate tells the Ségur chapter the other way around. Alfred Danflou, a Bordeaux publisher who wrote and photographed a series of monographs on the great châteaux, gave Calon one in 1867:

The name of M. de Gasc is the oldest in order of date, and we have been unable to find any detail about this possessor of Calon, who enlarged and improved the vineyard by following the methods and the example of his neighbors at Château-Lafitte and Château-Latour. M. le président Ségur later acquired it, and the growth then became a great dignitary.

« Le nom de M. de Gasc est le plus ancien par ordre de date... qui augmenta et améliora le vignoble en suivant les méthodes et l'exemple de ses voisins de Château-Lafitte et de Château-Latour. M. le président Ségur en fit plus tard l'acquisition, et ce crû devint alors un grand dignitaire. »

The sentence behind the label has Ségur preferring Calon to Lafite and Latour. Danflou has Calon becoming good by imitating them, in the very paragraph that tells how the Ségur name reached the property.

The books have never settled what to call the man. Danflou says "le président Ségur," Féret's directory "the comte de Ségur," and the estate calls him both marquis and president of the parlement. Once his family had gone, the books would struggle with the estate's name as well.

Priced lower, and listed without the Ségur name

The Ségurs sold Calon to the Dumoulin family in 1778. By 1824 Franck's Saint-Estèphe table had "Segur (de)" in the column for former proprietors and "Dumoulin" in the column for present ones.

The decline began under the new owners. Firmin Lestapis paid 600,000 francs for Calon in 1825 and bought, in Danflou's phrase, an estate "in a sort of decline."

Pierre Biarnez, the Bordeaux poet who set the growths of the Médoc in rhyme in 1849, blamed the owner who left. He found "three growths of noble race" in Saint-Estèphe: Cos, Calon and Montrose. Of Calon he wrote:

Calon-Ségur, at first under one proprietor, / Was long honored as a great dignitary; / Scarcely was it abandoned by its master / Than it was condemned to fall below a third: / But that same hand will work a transformation; / It works a piece of ground that will become Montrose.

"A great dignitary" is Biarnez's phrase for an old aristocrat among growths, and Danflou's prose borrows it.

The rankings were slower than the prices. Franck's ranking of 1824 had Calon among the third growths, and his edition of 1845 kept it there. Yet his own figures for 1833 to 1840 show Calon under Lestapis selling at 700 to 900 francs the tonneau, while Montrose next door fetched 1,200 to 1,300.

Then the books let it fall. Charles Cocks's English guide of 1846 noted in passing that Calon, "though formerly the first cru of the parish, is now among the fourth." His French edition of 1850 duly lists it among the fourth growths. Franck's 3rd edition of 1853 put it there too and renamed it for its owner: "Calon-Lestapis, anciennement Ségur," Calon-Lestapis, formerly Ségur. For a moment, on paper, the estate lost the Ségur name altogether. Franck added a footnote: "Calon and St-Pierre have sometimes sold as third growths, and that is the rank certain connoisseurs assign them."

In the classification year itself, Charles Saint-Amant, a Bordeaux writer walking the Médoc for a general reader, put the doubt into one clause. Calon-Ségur, "of M. Lestapis or Phélan," was "a very good wine tossed between the third and the fourth class, according to the year," « balloté entre la troisième et la quatrième classe, suivant l'année ».

The brokers of the Bordeaux exchange settled it in April 1855. Their handwritten tableau puts the estate among the third growths, and the name they wrote for it is "Calon," with Lestapis "de Paris" as proprietor. The founding document of the classification does not carry the Ségur name. The exhibition jury that year did, in an honorable mention to "F. LESTAPIS (Calon-Ségur)."

A heart nobody recorded

Saint-Amant is the nearest thing the case has to a witness at the scene. He walked through the buildings in 1855 and wrote them down: a domain "altogether princely," the château "of an elegant form," freshly restored, and vat houses and cellars fitted with "railway, gears, cranes, pulleys, covered vats and presses," which he said could be called models. Counting the machinery down to the rails, he records no heart on the building and no sentence from its past.

Danflou, 12 years later, admires the terraces and sculpted ramps, calls Calon "one of the palaces of the Gironde vine," and credits Lestapis with having "restored to Calon the high rank it had held from time immemorial."

He was not a man to leave a good story out. His Calon monograph retells at length, from what he calls an old charter, how in 1331 Mossen Gombaud de Calon rode out of his château escorting the bride of the lord of Lesparre on a white palfrey. Gombaud set her down on armorial carpets without letting her feet touch the ground, and kept the palfrey, the saddle, the harness and her cloak by a right he traced to contracts of the 8th century. He mentions no heart and no sentence.

The marquis's nickname has 3 homes in the record, and none of them is on the label. The estate says Louis XV called him the Prince of the Vines at court, and ties the name to Calon. Malvezin's tax file gives it to the owner of Lafite and Latour: "Le propriétaire de ces deux domaines, qu'on appelait « le prince des vignes »," the owner of these two domains, who was called "the prince of the vines."

Féret's directory, in its editions of 1874 and 1893, gives it to a different Saint-Estèphe estate altogether. Château Ségur-Garramey, the property that became Phélan-Ségur, was formed "by the union of the two domains that gave it their name; one of them belonged to the comte de Ségur, nicknamed the prince of the vines." Féret's entries for Calon-Ségur carry no nickname and no heart.

G.A.K., an anonymous London author who surveyed the classified growths in 1920, gives Calon-Ségur a full section. It has the name history, "formerly known as 'Chateau Calon de Segur,' and still more anciently 'Chateau Calon'"; 55 hectares "all in a single holding"; and an average of 225 tonneaux, "the largest quantity" of any third growth. It credits "the Marquis de Segur, from whence comes the title 'Calon-Segur.'" And it reproduces the brand the estate burned into its casks, CALON SEGUR, PREMIER CRU DE ST ESTEPHE, MEDOC, a claim to first place in the commune with no heart on it. The same words stand on the château wall today, inside a heart.

The French heritage inventory, which surveyed the property in 1986, records a 17th-century house, 19th-century chais, a chapel and a park, and no inscription. The date of the heart on the chai rests on the estate's word alone. By the estate's own dating, the heart on the label belongs to the 20th century. The estate describes the use of the emblem as "a brilliant marketing idea, well before its time."

The sentence the heart illustrates is offered as 18th-century speech, and nobody has yet produced the step between the speech and the carving.

No known document of the marquis's lifetime carries the words, and none from the 2 centuries after. In 244,000+ wine documents, the oldest from 1373, the sentence does not occur once.

The earliest printed attribution yet found is in Alexis Lichine's Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits of 1967; the earliest in French, in 1991. For so celebrated a French sentence, the French paper trail is strangely the shorter one.

A search of documents cannot hear speech, and it reads only the pages it holds. Lichine's encyclopedia also appeared in French, in Paris, in the 1970s, and whether that translation carried the sentence into French before 1991 is an open question.

Rated by its wine, sold by its heart

The Gasqueton family, in Saint-Estèphe by 1883 at Capbern, bought Calon in 1894, when Georges Gasqueton acquired it with his uncle, Charles Hanappier. The estate stayed with the family until 2012, when it was sold to Suravenir, a subsidiary of the Crédit Mutuel Arkéa group.

The critics have since agreed with Danflou, who in 1867 thought Calon deserved to be put back among the second growths, "which it long occupied." A reclassification of the Médoc from critics' scores for the vintages 1970 to 2005, made at Cornell in 2008, moved only 2 third growths up to the seconds: Calon-Ségur and Palmer. Sold en primeur, the trade's early sale of a vintage while the wine is still in barrel, Calon-Ségur's 2021 was priced above 6 of the second growths in a sample economists tabulated in 2023, Léoville Barton and Rauzan-Ségla among them.

Those rankings are the wine's own doing. The heart has not needed a witness to work. It is what the label sells, to drinkers who have never heard of Franck's table or Saint-Amant's walk through the cellars.

The verdict

The claim on trial is that the Marquis de Ségur said "My heart is at Calon." The court found no witness. The record of his century keeps Calon's name and price, the prices of the wines he sold from Lafite and Latour, and no sentence. The century after left 2 detailed visits to the property, a directory that knew his nickname and gave it to another estate, and no sentence. The court does not say he never said it. It says that, as far as the searched record reaches, nobody who heard it wrote it down.

Legend. No court can rule on a dead man's heart. It rules on the words: no witness in his century, none located in the 2 centuries after, and the earliest printed attribution yet found is an encyclopedia of 1967. A legend, then: not disproven, simply unwitnessed. The love, for all anyone knows, was real.

The wine

Calon-Ségur is the northernmost classified growth of the Médoc and the only third growth in Saint-Estèphe. Since the sale of 2012 its owners have been replanting, on a program that runs to 2032. The new vat room and the renovated barrel cellars came into use in 2016, and the restoration of the château and its gardens was finished in 2019. The second wine is called Le Marquis de Calon Ségur, and the heart is on both labels.

In the marquis's own decade Lafite and Latour fetched nearly twice what Calon did, and Calon was still the first wine of Saint-Estèphe. That is the rank the old cask brand claimed, and the words the château wall still carries, inside its heart.

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.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc et les autres vins rouges du département de la Gironde, 1st edition, Bordeaux, 1824, the Saint-Estèphe table, the table of prices since 1745, and the classification.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1845, the table of prices since 1745, the prices of 1833 to 1840, and the table of estate sales.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux: Its Wines, and the Claret Country, London, 1846, Saint-Estèphe.
• Pierre Biarnez, Les grands vins de Bordeaux : poëme, Paris, Plon Frères, 1849, pp. 46 to 47.
• Charles Cocks, Bordeaux, ses environs et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, Bordeaux, Féret fils, 1850, the classification, p. 243.
• William Franck, Traité sur les vins du Médoc, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1853, the classification.
• Charles Saint-Amant, Le vin de Bordeaux : promenade en Médoc, Bordeaux, 1855, Saint-Estèphe.
• Alfred Danflou, Les grands crus bordelais : monographies et photographies des châteaux et vignobles, Bordeaux, 1867, Château de Calon.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 2nd edition, Bordeaux, 1868, the awards of the 1855 jury.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins classés par ordre de mérite, 3rd edition, Bordeaux, 1874, 6th edition, 1893, and 9th edition, 1922, Saint-Estèphe, the notes on Château Ségur-Garramey and Château Phélan-Ségur.
• Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, Bordeaux and its Wines Classified in Order of Merit, 2nd English edition, Bordeaux, 1883, Saint-Estèphe.
• Théophile Malvezin, Histoire du commerce de Bordeaux depuis les origines jusqu'à nos jours, volume III, Bordeaux, 1892, the Ségur estates from the intendant's files, Archives de la Gironde, series C, no. 3214.
• G.A.K., Clarets and Sauternes: Classed Growths of the Médoc and Other Famous Red and White Wines of the Gironde, London, 1920, section XXXI, Château Calon-Ségur, and the cask brand.

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.
• Ministère de la Culture, base Mérimée, dossier IA00024816, Château Calon-Ségur, inventory of 1986, for the house, the chais, the chapel and the park.
• Alexis Lichine, Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits, 1967, the earliest printed attribution of the sentence.
• 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.
• Philippe Masset, Jean-Philippe Weiskopf and Jean-Marie Cardebat, "Efficient pricing of Bordeaux en primeur wines," Journal of Wine Economics, 2023, Table 2. doi.org

The estate and the trade.

• Château Calon Ségur, "Le cœur, plus qu'un symbole" and "The Prince of the Vines," the estate's pages, for the sentence as the estate tells it, the dating of the heart on the chai and on the label, and the nickname given at court. calon-segur.fr
• Château Calon Ségur, "Over the centuries" and "The project," the estate's pages, for the purchase of 1894 with Charles Hanappier, the family's tenure, the sale of 2012 to Suravenir, the replanting program, and the new vat room, cellars and restoration of 2016 and 2019. calon-segur.fr

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, "Who said 'my heart is at Calon'?", Bordeaux Reviews, Château Case Files 14/70, 2026, https://bordeauxreviews.com/case-files/who-said-my-heart-is-at-calon/.

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.