Armand Lalande et Cie

The house

François Louis Marie Armand Lalande, born in Bordeaux on December 10, 1820, was a merchant of the quai des Chartrons who became one of the great proprietors of the Médoc. He gave Château Cantenac Brown back its name in 1860 and enlarged the house. In 1868 Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, whose Bordeaux et ses vins was the directory of the Bordeaux trade, listed Léoville Poyferré, at Saint-Julien, under A. Lalande et d’Erlanger.

He was a public man as well. Théophile Malvezin, whose history of the Bordeaux trade appeared in 1892, gives him 8 years at the head of the Chamber of Commerce, from 1877, when he followed Lucien Faure, to 1885, when Hubert Prom took his place. At the Exposition universelle of 1878 he won a diploma of honor for the collections of Gironde wines. In October 1881 Lalande presided over the international phylloxera congress at Bordeaux, and the delegates were taken to see “the handsome château of Brown-Cantenac, belonging to M. Armand Lalande”. He also sat as a deputy for the Gironde, and in 1886 he was consul of Austria in Bordeaux.

His holdings grew. Château Sénilhac, at Saint-Seurin-de-Cadourne, was his by 1883, at 200 tonneaux (the old Bordeaux measure of a crop, 900 liters, or 4 barrels), and won a gold medal at Paris in 1889. At Saint-Julien, Château Moulin Riche dates from 1885, and by 1898 its 23 hectares were land Lalande had drawn in part from the Cadillon property. In 1886 he owned Cantenac Brown, Léoville Poyferré and La Couronne, at Pauillac, a vineyard he had just planted. He died in Bordeaux on September 24, 1894.

The firm also bought at the estates. G.A.K., the anonymous London author whose Clarets and Sauternes of 1920 followed the sales of each classed growth vintage by vintage, gives A. Lalande et Cie part of the Mouton d’Armailhacq crop in 1893 and 1906. At Cantenac Brown it bought the vintages of 1899, 1900, 1904, 1905 and 1909, and every one from 1911 to 1918. In 1922 Sénilhac was with the heirs of Armand Lalande. Léoville Poyferré and Moulin Riche were with the Lawtons by 1920, and that year the Lawtons sold them to the Cuvelier family, who hold them still.

At a glance

Kind

House of the past

Based in

Bordeaux

Direction

Armand Lalande, president of the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce from 1877 to 1885

Châteaux

Cantenac Brown, from 1860; Léoville Poyferré, from 1868; Sénilhac, by 1883; Moulin Riche, from 1885

In the record

Mouton d’Armailhacq, 1893 and 1906; Cantenac Brown, 1899 to 1918

Today

Léoville Poyferré and Moulin Riche, with the Cuvelier family since 1920