L. Rosenheim et Fils

The house

L. Rosenheim et Fils bought wine by the crop. The monopoly was its trade: the arrangement by which a Bordeaux house takes the whole of an estate’s harvest. Its name comes up again and again in Clarets and Sauternes, the book of 1920 in which G.A.K., an anonymous London author, followed the sales of each classed growth vintage by vintage. The house held the monopoly of Château Ferrière in 1883, of Calon-Ségur in 1886 and 1894, and of Léoville Las Cases in 1895, 1896 and 1897. Around 1900 it bought 3 whole crops in 3 years: the Rauzan-Ségla of 1899, the Marquis d’Alesme Becker of 1900 and the Figeac of 1901.

At Château Mouton d’Armailhacq, the estate now called d’Armailhac, the wine was for a long time the house’s monopoly: it bought the vintages of 1894, 1897, 1899, 1903, 1905 and 1907, and each year from 1910 to 1913. Édouard Féret, who carried on the directory of the Bordeaux trade that Charles Cocks had begun, noted in 1901 that the white wines of Sirène-Lagrange were bought for 5 years by the Rosenheim house.

Then came the first growths. The house bought the Château Margaux of 1905. In 1906, with Lebègue et Cie, it took the Lafite crop and brought château bottling back to the estate. It went on to buy half the Lafite yield from 1907 to 1911 and the whole of it from 1912 to 1916.

In 1922 Château Marsac-Séguineau, at Soussans, on the Margaux side of the Médoc, had been under contract to L. Rosenheim & Fils for several years. In November 1926 a wine list printed at Wurzen, in Saxony, still offered a Saint-Estèphe of 1922 and a Haut-Sauternes of 1917 from the house. From the Ferrière of 1883 to that list in Saxony, the Rosenheim name runs through more than 4 decades of the trade.

At a glance

Kind

House of the past

Based in

Bordeaux

In the record

Ferrière, 1883; Calon-Ségur, 1886 and 1894; Léoville Las Cases, 1895 to 1897; Rauzan-Ségla, 1899; Marquis d’Alesme Becker, 1900; Figeac, 1901; Margaux, 1905; Lafite, 1906 to 1916; Marsac-Séguineau, 1922