1. History of the estate - Lafon Rochet

History of the estate

You are here on the estate of Château Lafon-Rochet in Saint-Estèphe (4th Grand Cru Classé in 1855). At the beginning, it was a family property belonging to Antoinette de Guillemotes that married Etienne de Lafon in 1650 and brought the estate of “Rochet” as a dowry for marriage. Only a century later Jean Lafon, heir to the Rochet estate, baptized it “Lafon-Rochet”. After more than two centuries in this family, the property passed into the hands of different families who succeeded each other every 20 to 30 years.

Then the Tesseron family, native from Cognac, became the owner when Guy Tesseron acquired the winery in 1960. Three generations (Michel then Basile Tesseron) succeeded each other in the destiny of the property for sixty years. Late 2021, the Lorenzetti family owning the Exceptional Cru Bourgeois next door, Château Lilian Ladouys (in 2008), the Château Pédesclaux (in 2009) located in Pauillac and the half of the Château d’Issan (in 2013) located in Margaux, acquired the Château Lafon-Rochet.”

1. History of the estate - Lafon Rochet

The house was built between 1963 and 1974 after its acquisition by Guy Tesseron. Architecturally, it’s in the “chartreuse” style of the eighteenth century, : a master house with a single ground floor on cellar, composed of a central building in length with a symmetrical order, framed or not by two pavilions in forebody. Most of the house’s foundations are made of concrete, so it remained entirely grey for about thirty years, which made it barely visible from the road. Because of that, it was painted in yellow in 2000 and then the bottle label and caps became yellow too.

As for the small square building next to you, it is a chapel whose construction date we do not know exactly. In fact, Lafon-Rochet is on one of the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela (in Spain).

We own 40 hectares (98,8 acres) of one piece all around the property and technical facilities. It’s an unusual fact to have so many vines of a single block in the Médoc region because often the plots of the other properties are scattered around the whole appellation.

The vineyard is composed of 47% Cabernet Sauvignon, 45% Merlot, 4% Petit Verdot and 4% Cabernet Franc with an average age of 35 years. The oldest vines are 84 years old.

Although more than fifteen subsoils have been discovered on our 40 hectares, three main types stand out: dry gravely soil, pure clays (with a large presence of blue clays, very typical in Pomerol) and the mother rock: limestone about 5 meters thick under our feet. The pebbles observed on the surface in the rows of vines are called “Graves”. They are mixed with sand, thus very draining that allow the root system to go deeper.

1. History of the estate - Lafon Rochet
1. History of the estate - Lafon Rochet