Château Figeac: An Estate Divided
The fracturing of the domaine was significant, as sometime before this sale in 1838, or perhaps at the same time, other sections were sold off. These sections were acquired by a Monsieur Chauvin (who also crops up in my Château Chauvin profile), a Monsieur Largeteau and a Monsieur Louis-Urbain Lebel. This still left the widow with a very large estate, perhaps 130 hectares, and the same year that Ducasse took his second portion she sold all that remained, the price 155,000 francs, the buyer being Nicolas Fauvel and his wife Marie Louise Philiberte Lebel, perhaps a relative of the aforementioned Louis-Urbain Lebel. What had once been one of Bordeaux’s most extensive estates (and what is left today is still pretty large, to be fair) was now divided between at least five different owners. Tracing the story of the estate through all these different owners becomes rather complicated, nevertheless I have done my best to clarify the sequence and number of owners.
A few years later, in 1850, the first edition of Cocks et Féret was published, and it placed Figeac among the deuxième classe of properties of Haut St Emilion, a region distinguished from the Sables de St Emilion, where the more lowly troisième classe estates were largely to be found. There were, at this time, four proprietors working the land at Figeac, and these were Lebel, who had the largest production at 50 tonneaux per annum, Chauvin who turned out 35 tonneaux per annum, and then Largeteau and Lucasse, who each produced 25 tonneaux per annum. The first three names are familiar, but how Lucasse came to be making wine here isn’t clear. It seems acknowledged that in 1842 a notaire named Guillaume Laveine had purchased the main part of the estate (presumably the Lebel section), and yet he isn’t listed among the proprietors whereas Lebel was. Perhaps he was renting his part out to someone else.
