Château Certan de May: Born by Division
Being of presumably some wealth and standing it is perhaps not surprising that the Demay de Certan family lost possession of the Certan estate during the French Revolution. The property was confiscated as a bien national, but the family were able to retake possession after the revolutionary fervour had died down. Nevertheless it seems they never regained their previous status, perhaps because those wealthy nobles that survived the Revolution now lived under a regime of heavy taxation. The family held onto the estate for a little over half a century more, but ultimately they sold most of the property in 1858 to Charles de Bousquet, a banker from Paris. Bousquet renamed his rather grand acquisition Vieux Château Certan, a name familiar to all modern-day fans of the wines of Pomerol. In selling off their estate a small rump of vineyard, seemingly about 5 hectares, was all that the Demay de Certan family held on to. This they named – rather logically – Petit-Certan, and it is this smaller section of the original Certan vineyard that became the Château Certan de May that exists today.
Very little is known about the Petit-Certan estate at this time, although it seems likely that winemaking was outsourced to some extent, perhaps because of a lack of facilities which were presumably sold to Bousquet. The shred of evidence that suggests this comes from records at Château La Croix de Gay, during the tenure of Jean-Henri Angle, which show that stocks of Petit-Certan were being stored in the chai there. Otherwise we can only assume that the tending of the vines continued as before, and that winemaking presumably returned to Petit-Certan once the facilities had been brought up to scratch.
