André Lurton, Vintner of Choice Bordeaux, Dies at 94

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/obituaries/andre-lurton-dead.html

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André Lurton, the senior member of a Bordeaux wine family dynasty and one of the region’s leading entrepreneurs, died on May 16 in Grézillac, France. He was 94.

His death was confirmed by his family.

Between Mr. Lurton, his younger siblings — Lucien, Dominique and Simone — and assorted members of the next generation, the family owned more than 20 chateaus and more than 3,000 acres of vineyards, as well as properties in the south of France, Portugal, Spain, South America and Australia. Mr. Lurton’s company, Vignobles André Lurton, was one of Bordeaux’s largest.

Family members have also managed some of Bordeaux’s most illustrious estates. Pierre Lurton, a son of Dominique, is managing director of Château d’Yquem in Sauternes and has been a director of Château Cheval Blanc in St.-Émilion, both among the world’s most coveted wines.

André Lurton, who specialized in buying properties at their lowest value and nurturing them into valuable wine estates, inherited the family property, Château Bonnet, in 1953, when he was not yet 30. It was in Grézillac, in the Entre-Deux-Mers region of Bordeaux, an area known for its modest wines.

After two world wars and the Great Depression, Bordeaux in the 1950s was in a precarious state. A killer frost in 1956 devastated many properties, including Bonnet, and, when a series of mostly miserable vintages followed, many chateaus were on the brink of ruin.

“The experts said Bordeaux might never recover,” Mr. Lurton said in a 2005 interview with The New York Times. “But we proved them wrong a hundred times over.”

After the ’56 frost, Mr. Lurton patiently replanted Bonnet; to finance his plans, he at first grew grain for cattle. With success at Bonnet, he began to acquire more properties, first in Entre-Deux-Mers and then in the northern part of the more prestigious Graves area; these included Château La Louvière, Château de Cruzeau, Château Couhins-Lurton and Château de Rochemorin.

Graves, south of the city of Bordeaux, was the most ancient part of Bordeaux, known for its wines at a time when the Médoc, north of the city, was still mostly swampland. Yet Graves was a large area, and most of the finest producers, like Château Haut-Brion, Château La Mission Haut-Brion and Domaine de Chevalier, were concentrated in the northern part of the region, around the towns of Pessac and Léognan.

For years, Mr. Lurton led a persistent effort to construct a new appellation for the northern Graves, hoping it would bring prestige and distinction to the area. In 1987, he succeeded with the creation of Pessac-Léognan, which now encompasses the region just south of the city of Bordeaux.

In his method of acquiring estates when they could be had relatively cheaply, Mr. Lurton was carrying on a family tradition. His grandfather, Léonce Récapet, who ran a liqueur distillery, bought Château Bonnet in 1897, as well as several other estates, after phylloxera, a ravenous aphid that devastated European grapevines in the 19th century, had moved though Bordeaux.

André Lurton was born on Oct. 4, 1924, in Grézillac to Denise Récapet and François Lurton. When Mr. Lurton turned 20 in the fall of 1944, he joined the French army and fought the Germans in Alsace and into Germany. He also developed a taste for military vehicles, which he collected over the years and kept at Bonnet. After the war, he returned to Bordeaux to help in the family vineyards.

Mr. Lurton lived at Bonnet. He served as mayor of Grézillac for 45 years.

He is survived by seven children, Denise Lurton Moullé, Christine Lurton-Bazin de Caix, Edith Lurton-Boyer, Odile Lurton, François Lurton, Jacques Lurton and Béatrice Lurton-Vettori; a brother, Lucien; a sister, Simone; and numerous grandchildren. His wife, Elisabeth Garros, died in 2006, and his brother Dominique died in 2010.

André and Lucien Lurton were the dominant figures of their generation in the family dynasty, but they kept a distance from each other. Lucien’s properties, which he distributed among his 10 children in 1992, were largely in the north, except for Château Climens, an exceptional Sauternes estate, while André’s were mostly in the south and in Entre-Deux-Mers.

While Lucien was quiet and conservative, André was outgoing and vigorous, and often described himself as a vigneron, the French word for one who grows grapes and shepherds them into wine.

“André defines himself as a peasant,” Jean-François Werner, a journalist, once wrote in the wine magazine L’Amateur de Bordeaux. “He loves to count the hours he spent driving a tractor more than he loves to count the chateaus he owns.”