Bethmann

The house

The Bethmanns were a Protestant family of bankers from Frankfurt. In 1875 the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, the German national biography, told how 3 brothers were brought up there by their uncle Jakob Adami, and how one of them, Johann Jakob, settled in Bordeaux in the 18th century. By the late 1760s a Bethmann in Bordeaux had asked, through the Austrian embassy, to be the Emperor’s consul in the city, and the French court granted him his exequatur. The family has been based in the city ever since, as a house of trade and of banking. As Bethmann et Compagnie, the Bordeaux house kept up a correspondence with the Paris bank of Rothschild Frères from 1838 to 1858.

In the 19th century the Bethmanns put their money into the Médoc. William Franck, the Bordeaux merchant whose Traité sur les vins du Médoc first appeared in 1824, listed Le Cartillon, at Lamarque, and Lafon, at Le Pian, under their name in 1845. Charles Cocks, the Englishman whose guide grew into the directory of the Bordeaux trade, gave Le Cartillon 90 tonneaux (the old Bordeaux measure of a crop, 900 liters, or 4 barrels) under the same name in 1850.

The great holding was Gruaud-Larose, a Second Growth of Saint-Julien. Its owners in 1850 were Sarget, Bethmann and Boisgérard, and by 1853 the 3 families had divided it. In Les grands crus bordelais, the book of 1866 in which the Bordeaux publisher Alfred Danflou photographed the great estates, it belongs to MM. Bethmann, A. Faure and the baron Sarget. The estate was split in 1867, and by 1868 the share that became Gruaud-Larose-Faure stood in the names of Ed. and Ch. de Bethmann and Ad. Faure. Ed. Bethmann was still a proprietor at Saint-Julien at the phylloxera congress of 1881, and Ch. de Bethmann held Fongravey, at Blanquefort, from 1886 to 1899.

Alexandre de Bethmann, a co-owner of Gruaud-Larose, became mayor of Bordeaux and built the Fontaine des Trois Grâces on the Place de la Bourse. Château Olivier, the Cru Classé de Graves at Léognan, came into the family through the wife of his grandson Jacques de Bethmann. Jean-Jacques de Bethmann took over the running of the estate in 1982, and in 2021 his daughter Eléonore de Bethmann succeeded her brother Alexandre at its head. The Bethmanns have held Olivier for nearly 150 years.

At a glance

Kind

House of the past

Based in

Bordeaux

Founded

In Bordeaux by Johann Jakob Bethmann, of Frankfurt, in the 18th century

Châteaux

Gruaud-Larose, a share, 1850 to 1868; Le Cartillon, 1845 to 1850; Fongravey, 1886 to 1899

Today

The family holds Château Olivier, at Léognan; Eléonore de Bethmann at its head since 2021

Today

Château Olivier