Château Rouget: Dupuy de la Grand’Rive
François Marie Emmanuel Dupuy de la Grand’Rive was born on the mountains of the Massif Central, in Puy-de-Dôme. I suspect he came to Bordeaux to seek his fortune, or at the very least to earn a living, as many others did from Corrèze. In 1873 he married Jeanne Marie Catherine Denise Chaperon (1854 – 1939), the daughter of Paul Chaperon (1826 – 1903), from a well-known family of négociants and proprietors, and Anne Marie Louise Lacaze (1830 – 1920). This couple have already cropped up in other Pomerol profiles, most notably that of Château L’Évangile, which they owned.
François and his wife held onto the estate for some time. By 1908, when the estate was profiled in the 1908 Cocks et Féret, the property was spread over 14 hectares of the Pomerol landscape, with 8 hectares planted to vines. The production had crept up a little, perhaps as part of a post-phylloxera recovery, and was noted to be 25 tonneaux per annum, which implies a yield of 28 hl/ha (which would be considered low these days, but in the time before chemically assisted agriculture this would be a fairly typical figure. Perhaps more importantly, we can see at the time that the estate was ranked high in the appellation, among some famous names.
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