Cordier

The house

Nicolas Désiré Cordier, born at Maxéville, near Nancy, on August 11, 1861, founded his house at Toul, in Lorraine, in 1886. At the mobilization of 1914 he ran a free canteen at Toul station for 1 year, for the troops and the wounded passing through. For the whole war he lent the army his large premises at Toul, free of charge, to handle the wine sent to the men at the front. His own trade at Toul came to an end. With the front close by, he moved the house to Bordeaux during the war and bought land at once. Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey, a first growth of Sauternes, was his from 1917. His house held it until 1984, through most of the 20th century, and bottled the wine at the property when few did. At Gruaud-Larose, divided in 2 since 1867, he bought the Sarget half in the last years of the war.

Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, whose Bordeaux et ses vins was the reference book of the Bordeaux trade, list him in 1922 as the owner of Gruaud-Larose-Sarget, of Lafaurie-Peyraguey and of Fanning-Lafontaine at Pessac. By 1935 he had put Gruaud-Larose back together. Château Talbot was his as well. In December 1935 the letterhead of Domaines Cordier named 8 estates, from Meyney, at Saint-Estèphe, to the Château de l’Aulée, at Azay-le-Rideau on the Loire. Among them was La Tour Blanche, a first growth of Sauternes that belonged to the State and that Cordier farmed on shares.

Cordier made himself a figure of Saint-Julien. He became its mayor in 1925. In June 1934, looking for a way out of the crisis in the wine trade, he staged a festival of longevity in the village, with Albert Lebrun, the President of the Republic, as his guest. He died in 1940, and his son Jean took over the running of the house in 1947. The house kept buying: Domaines Cordier owned Clos des Jacobins, in Saint-Émilion, from 1964 to 2001.

Then the business passed through several groups. In 1997 the Val d’Orbieu group took the majority of the merchant house, and in 2000 Cordier merged with Mestrezat, a Bordeaux house dating from 1815, as Cordier Mestrezat. The agricultural cooperative group InVivo took 78% of it in 2015, its first step into wine, and in 2021 renamed its wine arm Cordier by InVivo. On April 30, 2026 the Cordier brand and its trading business in France and abroad, Café de Paris included, passed to the listed wine group AdVini, which paid mainly in its own shares. InVivo’s wine arm became a shareholder of AdVini, and on May 6 it took the name Vinadeis by InVivo. Château Talbot is still in the hands of the Cordier family.

At a glance

Kind

Négociant

Based in

Bordeaux, from the First World War

Founded

1886, at Toul, by Désiré Cordier

Owner

AdVini, the brand and the trading business, since April 30, 2026

Brands

Cordier; Cordier Collection Privée; Café de Paris

In the record

Lafaurie-Peyraguey, 1917 to 1984; Gruaud-Larose, the Sarget half in the war years, the whole by 1935; Clos des Jacobins, 1964 to 2001