Château Margaux: Frédéric Pillet-Will
Frédéric Pillet-Will (1837 – 1911), governor of the Banque de France, paid a whopping 5 million francs for Château Margaux, signing the contract in 1880. For his money he secured 235 hectares of land, and a vineyard of 81 hectares. Although he would not have known it at the time, it was a very bad time to buy. During the decades that followed, Pillet-Will had to deal with several new vineyard scourges, all diseases imported from the New World. First there was powdery mildew, then downy mildew, and then of course phylloxera.
The latter laid waste to the vineyards of Château Margaux, and the solution embraced by Pillet-Will was of course to replant on American rootstocks. The quality of the wine thereafter, between 1880 and 1920, for a number of reasons, was not as good as might be expected. One likely culprit was the age of the vineyard, now dominated by young vines; to deal with this in 1908 Pillet-Will introduced a ‘second wine’ at Château Margaux, which even at this early stage took the name Pavillon Rouge du Château Margaux. This new label soaked up all the fruit from the young vines, thereby ameliorating quality in the grand vin.
By 1896 Pillet-Will entrusted the running of the estate to a local courtier, Pierre Moreau. He continued with the subscription arrangements, striking a new deal with three merchants, Eschenauer, Journu and Schröder et Schÿler in 1907. Frédéric Pillet-Will died a few years later, in 1911, and the property was bequeathed to the next generation. His marriage had produced a daughter, Hélène Pillet-Will (1875 – 1964), who had married Charles Marie de la Trémoille (1863 – 1921), and it was this couple who took over the management of the estate.
