Syndicat régional des courtiers en vins et spiritueux de Bordeaux, Gironde et Sud-Ouest

The house

Brokers were part of the Bordeaux trade long before they had an association of their own. The mayor and the jurats, the magistrates of the city, named them until an ordinance of Charles IX of June 1572 made their posts into offices.

In 1855 the Chamber of Commerce of Bordeaux asked the Chambre syndicale des courtiers, the chamber of the city’s sworn commercial brokers, to rank the wines of the Gironde for the Exposition Universelle in Paris. The chamber delivered its list on April 18, 1855. J. Ferrier, whose guide for buyers of good wine came out in 1857, gave it its full name, Chambre syndicale des courtiers de commerce de Bordeaux. On November 16, 1867 the same chamber set a table of prices for the wines of the Médoc and Saint-Émilion. The directory of the Bordeaux trade, grown from the guide the Englishman Charles Cocks published in 1846, printed that table in its edition of 1874. Its edition of 1868 had given the wine brokers a chapter of their own, with a rule: a good broker must be an upright and honest man.

The wine and spirits brokers founded their own association on June 12, 1903. On March 19, 1914 their chamber, that of the courtiers de vins et spiritueux de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, declared the wines of Château Lyonnat, in Lussac, comparable to the premiers-seconds crus of Saint-Émilion. The directory printed the decision in its edition of 1922. A law of December 31, 1949 set the rules of the profession, and the association adopted its present statutes on September 12, 2002.

From January 1, 2016 an ordinance of December 17, 2015 replaced the professional card that brokers had needed since 1949 with a simple declaration. A law of December 9, 2016 then required knowledge and experience under conditions to be set by decree, and until that decree came, no new broker could be admitted. Decrees of October 13, 2020 changed the way in: a broker now passes an examination before a jury of the chambers of commerce and is entered on a national list kept by CCI France.

The association belongs to the national federation of wine and spirits brokers and has its seat in the CIVB’s building in Bordeaux. Cédric Roureau, of Bureau Blanchy et de Lestapis, has been its president since 2020, with Charles Ripert as secretary general. Its chamber elected him on October 12, 2020, the day before the decrees, to succeed Xavier Coumau, a courtier de campagne, or country broker, who had led the Bordeaux brokers for 10 years. Brokers handled 70% of the wine contracted in bulk in Bordeaux in the 2019-2020 season, from 89% in Saint-Émilion to 53% in the Côtes de Bordeaux. In July 2022 the association counted 78 member brokers in Bordeaux, out of 97 registered in Bordeaux and Bergerac. Of the 29 candidates who had sat the new examination since October 2020, 22 had passed.

At a glance

Kind

Institution

Based in

Bordeaux

Founded

June 12, 1903

Direction

Cédric Roureau, president since 2020; Charles Ripert, secretary general

In the record

Lyonnat, compared with the premiers-seconds crus of Saint-Émilion, March 19, 1914