Château Lespault-Martillac: The 19th Century
Château Lespault-Martillac does not feature in the very earliest works of Wilhelm Franck or Charles Cocks (died 1854), although this may be down to how much the authors desired to be comprehensive more than anything else. Writing in Traité sur les vins du Médoc (second edition, Chaumas, 1845), Wilhelm Franck dismissed the commune of Martillac as a source of petits vins rouges (I suspect this needs no translation), making no investigation of its wines at all. The same description was applied to the commune in the 1850 Cocks et Féret, remarkable when we consider that today this particular corner of Pessac-Léognan is home to Château Smith-Haut-Lafitte, one of the leading châteaux in the entire appellation, if not in all Bordeaux.
Wilhelm Franck seemed to realise the errors of their his ways though, and in a subsequent edition of Traité sur les vins du Médoc (third edition, Chaumas, 1853), he noted that the proprietor of Lespeau (the spelling has clearly mutated over the years) was the Bentéjac family, who were turning out between 25 and 30 tonneaux per annum. He lists it as one of the lesser estates of the region, in the deuxième catégorie, but at least the property made it onto the list. The Bentéjac family remained here during subsequent decades, the estate still under their direction in 1886, when it appeared in the latest edition of Cocks et Féret under the again-modified spelling of Lespaut. At this time the production had contracted very slightly, to 20 tonneaux of wine per annum, with no mention of any white wine at all.
