Château Belgrave: The Bruno-Devèz Era
Strangely, during the tenure of Bruno-Devèz Château Belgrave appears to be temporarily renamed Château Darroutty. I have been unable to determine the origin of this particular name, and why the change occurred. It never crops up again, and just a few years later the estate is listed as a cinquième cru in the 1855 classification of the Médoc, still in the possession of Bruno-Devèz, but now once again named Château Coutanceau, just as it had been named in the Lawton classification of 1815.
By 1868 we can see that although the estate remains with Bruno-Devèz it has been rebranded yet again, having been renamed Château Belgrave, and that production is up a little, at 80 to 90 tonneaux per annum. A commonly-told story goes that an English owner christened the estate so in honour of Belgravia, one of the posher districts of London. The origin of this tale appears to be the 1922 edition of Cocks et Féret, when the authors postulate that the name originated during the era of English domination in Guyenne (the historical province of France that incorporates modern-day Bordeaux). My trawl through the historical documents does not, however, seem to bear this story out, the name having been applied during the tenure of a Frenchman hundreds of years after the English were ousted from the region.
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