Tonnellerie Berger & Fils

The house

The Berger family founded the cooperage at Saint-Estèphe in 1954 and handed it down from one generation to the next. In 1992 it moved a few kilometers inland to Vertheuil, in the northern Médoc, where it works today. The TFF Group, the listed oak group of the François family, bought all of Berger & Fils in 2014, together with another Bordeaux family cooperage, Maury & Fils. Simon Grelier has been its general director since February 3, 2015, and since 2019 he has also run the group’s Right Bank cooperage, Darnajou.

In March 2021, with travel held back by the pandemic, the house took its tastings to its clients. It sent them samples of wine suited to their grapes, to taste at a distance with its coopers and choose their barrels, or it tasted their own wines and advised on the barrel. That September it hired Paul Janson to build its business in the United States.

All its barrels are made at Vertheuil, from oak of sustainably managed French forests, by a workshop of 8 coopers. Each is shaped, checked and signed by the cooper who made it.

At a glance

Kind

Cooperage

Based in

Vertheuil

Founded

1954, by the Berger family, at Saint-Estèphe

Owner

TFF Group, of the François family, since 2014

Direction

Simon Grelier, general director