Demptos

The house

Demptos has made barrels at Saint-Caprais-de-Bordeaux, southeast of the city, since 1825. The François family, whose TFF Group grew out of the Burgundy cooperage François Frères, arrived in 1989, and the group owns the house outright. For its 200th year, in 2025, Nicolas Bolchakoff wrote its history, La saison éternelle.

It went abroad early. A cooperage in the Napa Valley opened in 1982; a Spanish house and a venture in Hungary followed in 2000, and a cooperage at Yantai, in China, in 2006. The wood came closer too, with the stave mill Sogibois in 1999, and Tonnellerie Maury joined in 2014.

Since 1991 the house has run a research department with the faculty of enology of Bordeaux. In 1993 it filed a patent by Nicolas Vivas on the part molds play as oak staves dry in the open air. From 1995 it published a scientific journal of its own, the Journal des sciences et techniques de la tonnellerie. In 1998 it patented a way to control the heat of a barrel as it is bent and toasted, with Guy Bourgeois and Nicolas Vivas as inventors. At home it employs 50 people and holds the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label, which the French state gives to firms keeping a rare craft alive. François Witasse, its president since 2011, also chairs the coopers’ association of the Southwest. About 4 barrels in 5 leave France.

Its barrels are on record at 2 great estates of the Right Bank. For the 2022 vintage Château Cheval Blanc worked mainly with 5 coopers, Demptos among them; for the 2023 vintage Château Canon worked with 6, Demptos again among them. Those are the records of those 2 years.

At a glance

Kind

Cooperage

Based in

Saint-Caprais-de-Bordeaux

Founded

1825

Owner

TFF Group, of the François family, since 1989

Direction

François Witasse, president

Abroad

Napa Valley, 1982; Spain and Hungary, 2000; China, 2006

In the record

Cheval Blanc, 2022 vintage; Canon, 2023 vintage