Château Léoville-Las-Cases: Adolphe de Las Cases
By this time Pierre-Jean was already dead, having passed away in 1815. In 1776, however, he had married Rose Budes de Guébriant (1756 – 1810) and they had two children, a son Adolphe de Las Cases (1782 – 1880) and a daughter Sidonie de Las Cases (born 1773). It was the former who took on the running of the estate, and who managed it for much of the early 19th century. During this time production steadily climbed, to between 100 and 130 tonneaux per annum by 1845, a figure simplified to 120 tonneaux by the authors of the first edition of Cocks et Féret in 1850.
It was not long afterwards that the 1855 classification of the Médoc was drawn up as ordered by Napoleon III (1808 – 1873), prior to the Exposition Universelle de Paris that year. All three of the Léoville estates were classed as deuxièmes crus. By this time the production, according to Wilhelm Franck in Traité sur les vins du Médoc (third edition, Chaumas, 1853), was between 100 and 150 tonneaux per annum. The figure quoted by the authors of Cocks et Féret in 1868 was the same, although they also noted the vineyard to be 50 hectares in size.
