Château Lafon-Rochet: Louis Arnaud
Following a period of contraction and perhaps stagnation, it was Louis Arnaud Blaise and his wife, Marie-Chevalier Pages, who set about re-establishing the vineyard. In doing so it seems they enjoyed considerable success, although only as a result of many decades of tiresome work. It was thanks to their efforts that the wine was established on the marketplace, and sold well at a decent price, sufficient to see the estate ranked as a quatrième cru in the 1855 classification of the Médoc.
Upon the death of Louis Arnaud, the estate remained in the ownership of Marie-Chevalier and her son, Pierre Alcide Lafon de Camarsac (1821 – 1905), with the former holding a two-thirds majority.
Pierre was a photographer and he exhibited little interest in viticulture and wine, preferring instead to follow a more artistic lifestyle in Paris, and so it was perhaps a wise move by Marie-Chevalier to bequeath the majority of her portion, upon her death in 1888, to Pierre Alcide’s daughter (and thus her granddaughter), Lucie. Under Lucie’s direction the estate went from strength to strength, and were it not for the usual litany of vineyard disasters, namely oidium and phylloxera, this situation may well have continued. But as it was the vineyard was devastated, and the Lafon de Camarsac family were forced to sell the property in 1895.
Thus the ownership of Château Lafon-Rochet by the descendants of Etienne de Lafon finally came to an end.
After the Lafons
The new owner was Frederic Audon, who acquired the property including its 26-hectare vineyard for the very reasonable sum of 110,000 francs, and with some suitable investment it was once more a productive and fruitful venture. It remained with Audon until 1924, when due to his divorce from Marie Madeleine Lucie Buttura, the property was sold to Marcel Ricard and his wife Catherine Marguerite Eyssand. Catherine subsequently died, but her family held onto the estate for a few years, before also selling it on in 1938, this time to Elie and Berthe Nafrechoux, who passed it on two years later to Charles Louis Duquenoy-Legry, a French brewer. It was not unusual, in the early 20th-century, for estates to change hands a number of times; the economic climate was challenging, and this was further impacted by the need to regroup after the devastation of phylloxera.
