Château L’Église-Clinet: La Famille Mauleon
Martial Mauleon and his wife Marie had five children, a daughter and four sons, of whom one died at just one month of age although the others presumably survived into adulthood. The daughter was named Marie Joséphine Mauleon (born 1875), and on June 1st 1896 she married Jean Rabier in Pomerol. It seems that little is known of Jean’s origins, other than he was the only son of another Jean Rabier who married a Louise Gadras and lived in Saint-Denis-de-Pile, a few kilometres north of Lalande-de-Pomerol.
Control of the vineyard subsequently passed to Marie-Joséphine Mauleon sometime around the turn of the century, and thus Jean Rabier also now had his hand at least partly on the tiller. It was around this time, however, that the family decided that they would contract out the running of the vineyard en fermage, a well-established system in which the landlord and those who work the land each take a mutually agreed share of the profits.
Under this system ownership of the estate was passed to their daughter René Rabier, who married a farmer from Coutras named Durantou. Take a look at Coutras on a map and it doesn’t look that far from Libourne (and civilisation in general) but having driven out there a few years ago (when I was house-hunting, believe it or not) I discovered the rural isolation of this place. It is very pastoral, although thanks to the presence of a good TGV connection into Bordeaux it is increasingly popular with commuters, as property prices here are so cheap. More importantly, then and now, there is not a vine to be seen here. The family vines in distant Pomerol remained en fermage.
