Tastet & Lawton

The house

Abraham Lawton came to Bordeaux from Cork in 1739 and bought and shipped wine for some years before he turned broker. His ledger for December 16, 1757 records purchases of wines entered as Suisse-Latour and Suisse-Lafite, at 1,300 livres a tonneau (the old Bordeaux measure of a crop, 900 liters, or 4 barrels). Théophile Malvezin, in his history of the Bordeaux trade of 1892, lists him among the courtiers (brokers, who place the châteaux’ wine with the merchants) who worked for foreign buyers in the 1760s.

The family stayed in the trade. William Lawton wrote in a memorandum of 1815 that Margaux strikes a balance between Lafite and Latour, and he listed the estate now called Belgrave under its old name of Brisson. A sworn broker was then appointed by the state, and the Lawtons handed the seat down. William was appointed courtier at Bordeaux on December 17, 1818; his son Jean Édouard took the seat on December 21, 1825, and his nephew Guillaume Henri Louis Lawton in 1856. The firm took the name Tastet et Lawton in 1830, when a partner came in, and the Tastets and the Lawtons both worked from the quai des Chartrons, on the Bordeaux waterfront. William Lawton also held Château de Pez, and in 1920 the family sold Léoville Poyferré and Moulin Riche to the Cuveliers. Daniel Lawton, who ran the firm for decades, died in 2015, and his nephews took it on; in 2020 the historian Alain Blondy published the family’s story, Les Lawton, une dynastie bordelaise du vin.

Historians still work from what the house kept. Its notes on each harvest start in 1795, and its report of 1903 called the quality of that year insignificant. Édouard Lawton, a broker since 1891, wrote in his diary in 1947 that he had never seen such a crisis in trading. The office books follow the wine a long way: Cos d’Estournel, sent to Calcutta in 1831, 1834 and 1837.

At a glance

Kind

Courtier (wine broker)

Based in

Bordeaux, 60 quai des Chartrons

Founded

By Abraham Lawton, in Bordeaux from 1739; Tastet et Lawton from 1830

Direction

The nephews of Daniel Lawton, since 2015

Records

Ledgers from 1757; harvest notes from 1795

In the record

Suisse-Latour and Suisse-Lafite, 1757; Cos d’Estournel to Calcutta, 1831 to 1837; Belgrave, then Brisson, 1815