Appears in
Oxford Companion to Wine

By Jancis Robinson

Published 2006

  • About

Ségurs, important family in the history of the bordeaux wine region, originally from the village of pauillac. In 1670, Jacques de Ségur, a notary who was a councillor of the legal Parlement of Bordeaux, became the second husband of Jeanne de Gasq, daughter of another Parlement councillor. As a dowry she brought with her the seigneurie of lafite, to add to others he had including Calon in st-estèphe, and an estate of about 1,000 ha/2,470 acres to the north of Pauillac. Their son Alexandre de Ségur was born in 1674. His father died in 1691, but in 1695 he married Marie-Thérèse de Clausel, the heiress of latour, which gave him all the southern part of Pauillac and another very large estate. Their son, the future Marquis Nicolas-Alexandre de Ségur, was born in Bordeaux in 1697, and when his father died in 1716 he took over the very large domaine, which then included the farm of mouton before it passed in the 1730s to the Marquis de Branne. The marquis, a vice-president of the Bordeaux Parlement, was said to have been called ‘le prince de vignes’ by Louis XV. He is reputed to have said, ‘I make wine at Lafite and Latour, but my heart is at Calon,’ and on the label of Ch Calon Ségur there is today a large heart. When he died in Paris in 1755 he left a substantial fortune. He had four daughters and their descendants owned Ch Latour until 1962.