Château Suduiraut: From Phylloxera to AXA
Although we have Blaise de Suduiraut and the du Roy dynasty for establishing, expanding and consolidating the estate, it is the proprietors of the latter years of the 19th century that perhaps deserve most credit for really pushing the quality at Suduiraut. In the pre-phylloxera era that followed their successful ranking in 1855 Château Suduiraut won a series of grand awards, starting with a ministerial Gold Medal in 1867.
The estate changed hands in 1875, the new owner being Henri-Ferdinand Rabourdin (1812 – 1898), an industrialist who four years later handed it to his daughter Lucie, who was married to Emile Petit de Forest (1844 – 1899), an engineer. Under the tenure of Rabourdin and then Petit de Forest the property continued to prove itself, being awarded the First Prize of the General Council of the Gironde in 1887 and the Gold Medal of the Meeting of Podensac in 1890. The international exhibitions of Paris that characterised the latter half of the 19th century also saw the estate win a slew of awards, and in 1897 Petit de Forest was also commended for his work in reconstituting the Suduiraut vineyards using vines grafted onto American rootstock. Although today we are quite used to the concept of grafted vine-stock, at the time this was a new and highly innovative solution to the scourge of the French vineyard, phylloxera.
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