Château Cambon la Pelouse: The Betgé de Lagarde Era
Coraly Marie Amélie de Cambon-Lapelouze (1803 – 1854) was married on November 23rd 1829 to Jean Antoine Betgé de Lagarde (1788 – c.1850), and thus the family estate came into the hands of the Betgé de Lagarde family. Jean and Coraly had three sons, none of whom seems to have strayed very far from home, although the most significant as far as the story of this domaine is concerned was Pierre Paul Betgé de Lagarde (born 1834).
The estate crops up in the first ever edition of Cocks et Féret, published in 1850, under the name La Pelouse. At this time it was in the possession of Veuve Bedgé-Lagarde (the 1850 edition tended to be more lax with the spelling of names than later editions), this being the aforementioned Coraly, husband Jean having already died. The estate was a productive one, with an annual yield of 45 tonneaux per annum, equivalent to 180 modern-day barriques per year. From Coraly the estate then passed, after her death in 1854, to her son Pierre Paul, who was listed as proprietor (under the name Paul) in the 1868 Cocks et Féret. Of note, the name of the estate had now been changed to Château Cambon, although the production remained steady at 40 to 50 tonneaux per annum.
Eugène Delauney
It was not until later editions of Cocks et Féret that the authors deigned to publish any detail on the estate. It came in for some criticism, the authors first making positive comments before detailing their complaints. The wines, they wrote, had a “bodied character which distinguishes the produce of the good growths of Macau and Ludon”. Nevertheless they continued, “[b]eing forgotten for so long a time by us, these wines no longer rank with the superior bourgeois, a fact somewhat astonishing when we reflect upon their first class order and ancient reputation”. This once great estate was, it seems, already on the slide.
