A €72 million quarrel, and Champagne stops growing

The château the neighbors wanted

In April 2021 the Courtin family, who own Clarins, paid €72 million for Château Beauséjour, a Saint-Émilion premier grand cru classé with 6.75 hectares of vines on the limestone plateau beside Angélus and Canon. On October 22 a court in Libourne heard the case for undoing the sale, brought by the Cuvelier family of Clos Fourtet nearby.

The Duffau-Lagarrosse family had owned Beauséjour since 1847, and by 2020 some thirty of them shared it. They chose the Cuveliers' offer, about €10 million a hectare for the vines, and put the sale through SAFER, the state-supervised agency that oversees sales of farmland, a route that heads off any pre-emption and cuts the tax. SAFER had its own ideas. Its technical committee backed a personal bid from Stéphanie de Boüard-Rivoal of Château Angélus. Its board then chose neither, and gave the estate to Joséphine Duffau-Lagarrosse, an agronomist from the family, with the Courtins' money behind her. The deal was signed on the last day the sale agreement allowed.

The Cuveliers say they brought the deal to SAFER and should have had it; the new owners say SAFER was right to keep a family estate in the family rather than let a neighbor grow. Two courts have refused to throw the case out, in Libourne in 2023 and on appeal in Bordeaux in 2024. Last week's hearing worked through 250 pages of written argument, 111 of them SAFER's, in a case the court's rapporteur called out of the ordinary, Vitisphere reports (in French, for subscribers).

A ruling against the sale would take some unwinding. The €72 million has already been shared among the family's shareholders, and the buyers could claim for what they have invested since 2021. SAFER, which Vitisphere says collected €2 million on the deal, has a great deal riding on it: its insurer, Groupama, has said an error that serious would fall outside its cover, Wine-Searcher reports, citing the regional paper Sud-Ouest. No date has been reported for the ruling.

Elsewhere in Bordeaux, land prices are falling and growers are pulling up vines. On the plateau at Saint-Émilion, six and three-quarter hectares are worth five years in court.

No new villages

On October 21 the board of the Syndicat Général des Vignerons, Champagne's growers' union, voted to stop the review of the appellation's boundaries that the growers themselves had asked for in 2003. The review would have brought about forty villages into Champagne and taken two out. Champagne covers 319 villages, mostly in the Marne, inside lines drawn by a law of 1927.

The plan was made for a region expecting to ship 340 million bottles a year. In the twelve months to September it shipped about 271 million, after three years of falling sales, Vinabox reports. The union also points to the climate: Champagne's average temperature has risen about a degree Celsius in twenty years, enough to put the region in a different climate band from the one its 2003 criteria assumed. Maxime Toubart, the union's president, says the growers should decide what Champagne they want to make before redrawing where it can be made.

The review had been on hold at the growers' request since February 2025, and INAO, the national body for appellations, has the last word on closing it. The two villages that were to be cut out, Germaine and Orbais-l'Abbaye, keep their Champagne; Orbais-l'Abbaye's mayor called it excellent news.

The forty villages on the 2008 list stay, for now, merely near Champagne.

A smaller Beaune

The Hospices de Beaune hold their 166th wine sale on Sunday, November 15, with Sotheby's at the gavel under the market halls in Beaune. After a summer of heatwaves they are selling 432 barrels of the 2026 vintage, 348 of red and 84 of white, plus two half-barrels, against 539 barrels last year: about a fifth fewer. The Hospices' wine director, Ludivine Griveau, told a press conference in Paris last week that she had never seen a vintage like it in 26 years in the job, Wine-Searcher reports.

The charity barrel, the Pièce des Présidents, is a Clos de Vougeot grand cru for the first time, from vines the Faiveley family gave the Hospices. Its proceeds go to two charities for rare diseases: ARSLA, for ALS, and DEBRA France, for the skin disease epidermolysis bullosa. Last year's barrel sold for €400,000, and the whole sale made €18.75 million at the hammer. The celebrities who preside over the charity barrel have not been named yet.

Burgundy gets its first prices for 2026 on November 15, on a fifth less wine.

Until Thursday.