Cooperage
Seguin Moreau
How to read this
Capitals mark the stressed syllable. “an” is a nasal vowel: say it through the nose, with no n. The French r comes from the back of the throat. The recording is the reference.
In 2014 Seguin Moreau, born of 2 Charente workshops of the 19th century, helped Château Dauzac build wooden fermentation vats with 2 transparent staves, to let the estate’s team watch the grapes ferment.
The house
The Moreau cooperage started in the Charente in 1838 and the Seguin cooperage in 1870, and together they became Seguin Moreau. Rémy Martin, the cognac house, acquired the Seguin Moreau name in 1970. In 2001 the cooperage became part of Sabaté Diosos, a group of corks and barrels that took the name Oeneo on June 18, 2003 and is listed on Euronext Paris. Since 2020 Nicolas Hériard Dubreuil has chaired the group and Dominique Tourneix has run it.
The house works from Merpins, near Cognac, and, since 2008, from a workshop at Chagny, in Burgundy. It has a stave mill of its own at Ronchamp and, since 1994, a cooperage in the Napa Valley. Oeneo’s stave mills can cover up to 100% of its needs in French and American oak. It employed 193 people in 2024. Magdeleine Allaume has been its general director since 2022, and she also directs Millet, the Right Bank cooperage the group bought into in 2018.
Christian Normand and Jean-Baptiste Comoy invented the wooden vat with transparent staves for Seguin Moreau, which filed the patent on November 22, 2007. In 2014 Château Dauzac, the Margaux fifth growth at Labarde, built its first wooden fermentation vats with 2 transparent staves with the help of the cooperage. Through them its team could watch the grapes as they fermented.
Seguin Moreau works closely with the enologists of Bordeaux. Axel Marchal and Denis Dubourdieu invented a method that tells sessile oak from pedunculate oak by measuring compounds in the wood. On July 9, 2014 the cooperage filed the patent with Rémy Martin, the University of Bordeaux and the Institut Polytechnique de Bordeaux. Alexandre Pons, a researcher the cooperage has seconded to the enology research unit of the University of Bordeaux, has guided doctoral work there. On December 15, 2021 Marie Courregelongue defended a thesis, funded by Seguin Moreau, on how toasting changes the aromas of oak.
At a glance
- Kind
- Cooperage
- Based in
- Merpins, near Cognac
- Founded
- 1838, the Moreau cooperage; 1870, the Seguin cooperage
- Owner
- The Oeneo group
- Direction
- Magdeleine Allaume, general director
- Abroad
- Napa Valley, since 1994
- In the record
- Dauzac, wooden vats, 2014
Sources
- Books and studies
- Marie Courregelongue, Impact des opérations de chauffe sur la diversité aromatique du bois de chêne, 2021; Emilie Suhas, Etude sur les déterminants moléculaires du bouquet de vieillissement des vins, 2023
- Registers
- Société Seguin Moreau et Compagnie, SIREN 905 920 013 (Annuaire des Entreprises); Seguin Moreau Ronchamp, SIREN 402 078 117 (Annuaire des Entreprises); Company record, Société Seguin Moreau et Compagnie (Pappers); INPI, FR 2924125, Cuve de vinification améliorée en bois à douelles transparentes, filed November 22, 2007; USPTO, US 2016/0011166, Method for identifying the oak species of an oak wood sample, priority July 9, 2014
- Press
- Le Moci, Palmarès 2016 : Seguin Moreau, prix Performance Grand Export, November 25, 2016; Napa Valley Register, Building a perfect wine barrel, 2008
- Châteaux
- Château Dauzac, The property
- Its own publications
- Oeneo: Le groupe Oeneo, annual report 2025 to 2026; Seguin Moreau, Expertise
Revised October 14, 2026. How I choose sources
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