Mestrezat Grands Crus

The house

Domeine-Guillaume Mestrezat, born in Geneva in 1788, and his cousin Henry Cart founded Mestrezat & Cie in Bordeaux in 1815. The house shipped its first wine to India, to Pondicherry, in 1836. In 1841 its founder, then president of the board of the railway from Bordeaux to La Teste, was made a knight of the Legion of Honour. The house showed at the international exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. Théophile Malvezin’s Histoire du commerce de Bordeaux, a history of the city’s trade printed in 1892, lists a Mestrezat among the judges of its commercial court.

In the great growths it bought by the crop. Clarets and Sauternes, a survey of the classed growths printed in London in 1920, shows how Château Latour sold its crop from 1906 to 1910: by subscription, for 5 years, in thirds. Its 3 buyers were Gaden and Klipsch, Mestrezat et Cie and Mateo Petit fils. The same book names Mestrezat among the buyers of Lagrange in 1901 and 1904, and of Figeac in 1904. In 1926 the firm became Mestrezat-Preller and turned to the wines of Bordeaux alone.

It bought 2 classed growths in the early 1970s, Château de Rayne-Vigneau in Sauternes and Château Grand-Puy Ducasse in Pauillac, as well as Château Lamothe-Bergeron in the Haut-Médoc. Rayne-Vigneau and Grand-Puy Ducasse later passed to the wine arm of Crédit Agricole.

Cordier and Mestrezat merged in 2000 and settled in the rue Achard, in Bordeaux, in the old stables of the imperial guard of Napoleon III. The agricultural group InVivo took control of the merged house in 2015, and in 2016 the 2 were parted again, the Mestrezat side taking the name Mestrezat Grands Crus. In 2023 it joined the Laffort group, the Bordeaux maker of enology products founded in 1895, 80 years after Mestrezat. Yves Glotin is its managing director. The house deals in the great wines of Bordeaux in France and abroad, and it holds a stock of 1,500,000 bottles.

At a glance

Kind

Négociant

Based in

Bordeaux

Founded

1815, by Domeine-Guillaume Mestrezat and Henry Cart

Owner

The Laffort group, since 2023

Direction

Yves Glotin, managing director

In the record

Latour, one third of the crop, 1906 to 1910; Lagrange, 1901 and 1904; Figeac, 1904; Rayne-Vigneau, Grand-Puy Ducasse and Lamothe-Bergeron, bought in the early 1970s