W. & A. Gilbey

The house

Walter and Alfred Gilbey opened their first shop in Oxford Street, in London, in 1857. In 1867 Walter, Alfred and their brother Henry Parry Gilbey took the old Pantheon, a theater and concert hall on the same street, for their headquarters. By June 1869 the firm traded as wine merchants and distillers in London, in the Haymarket at Edinburgh and in Upper Sackville Street at Dublin. In 1875 W. and A. Gilbey of London bought Château Loudenne, at Saint-Yzans-de-Médoc, from the vicomtesse de Marcellus for 700,000 francs.

Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, whose Bordeaux et ses vins was the directory of the Bordeaux trade, counted 23 hectares of new vines there by 1883. The Gilbeys had spent 600,000 francs on a harbor on the Gironde and on buildings by 1886. They also bought at the classed growths, and G.A.K., the anonymous London author of Clarets and Sauternes in 1920, names the house as the buyer of the Léoville Barton of 1896. By 1898 the vineyard covered almost 100 hectares, and Loudenne was the French base where the Gilbeys gathered their purchases of the Médoc growths and let them age before shipping them to England. The family’s diaries stayed at Loudenne, and Nicholas Faith, the English writer on wine, used them, “so piously preserved at Chateau Loudenne”, for his account of the phylloxera.

Walter Gilbey became chairman when the business turned into a limited company in 1893, and in 1922 Loudenne still stood in the name of W. et A. Gilbey of London. In 1962 the company joined United Wine Traders to form International Distillers and Vintners. Watney Mann took it over in 1972, and Grand Metropolitan absorbed Watney Mann the same year. The Gilbey years at Loudenne ended in 2000, 125 years after the purchase.

At a glance

Kind

House of the past

Based in

London; in the Médoc at Château Loudenne, Saint-Yzans-de-Médoc

Founded

1857, by Walter and Alfred Gilbey

Château

Loudenne, from 1875 to 2000

In the record

Léoville Barton, 1896

Today

International Distillers and Vintners from 1962; Grand Metropolitan from 1972