Château de Camensac: Bruno Popp
Writing in Les Grands Crus Bordelais (Librairie Goudin, 1867), Alfred Danflou was full of praise for the vineyard and in particular its magnificent position, on “le côteau le plus beau” of the Médoc. He noted that the domaine belonged to Bruno Popp, a “viticulteur très distingué”, who not only excelled in the running of his vineyard it seems he also developed a new system in the chai for receiving and distributing the harvest to the vats. He installed a mobile press, which ran along the first floor, over the cuves on the level below. Thus the grapes could be received and dropped into the vessels with the minimum of effort. The author raved about the method, and clearly felt he had seen the future, predicting that the arrangement would soon be commonplace across the entire Médoc.
Strangely, while the property remained in the hands of this family, the situation appeared to decline during the years that followed. At the time of Danflou’s visit the vineyard was producing 70 to 80 tonneaux per annum, but by 1868 this was down to 50 to 70 tonneaux, a figure which Lorbac & Lallemand, writing in Les Richesses Gastronomiques de la France: Les Vins de Bordeaux (Hetzel, 1868) rounded down to 50 tonneaux. As Danflou also tells us the vineyard was just 25 hectares, this implies the yields at this time were in the order of 18 hl/ha, an impressively low figure.
There was little change through the 1870s and 1880s, and the next major development was the sale of the property which happened sometime between 1886 and 1897. The new owner, as described in Les Vins de Médoc (Édouard Féret, 1897), was Yves de Tournade, Comte de Grandière. Despite the arrival of phylloxera (which may well have precipitated the sale), production was still around 50 tonneaux.
