Widow Delbos: Bordeaux’s First Woman Wine Merchant

by Charlie Leary

Between 1808 and 1849 the widow Julie Delbos advanced her eponymous Bordeaux firm to the heights of success in the international wine trade, including owning a fleet of ships and offices in London and Saint Petersburg. In 1843, she secured 20% of Chateau Margaux’s production, which she sold in England.

Things didn’t go as well without her.

In 1855, her son Jean had failed an invitation to submit wines from the family’s Medoc estate to the Paris Exposition for that year’s historic classification. By 1856, Widow Delbos and Sons’ assets fell into liquidation. Tens of thousands of bottles of Margaux, Yquem, and Clos d’Estournel, alongside Delbos’ numerous cargo ships, were publicly auctioned on the Quai de Chartrons in 1857.

Julie had been born in Bordeaux in 1772, and remained there into her mid-70s, until 1849, when the mother of ten children finally left the city and retired to her beloved Chateau Virou, in Blaye, where she and her husband had fled in the 1790s to survive the Terror under the French Revolution. She died there in 1850, amid the cellars of Europe’s largest cloistered vineyard. And was promptly written out of her own story.

By the 1880s a history of the Bordeaux wine trade stated unequivocally that her firm’s heyday ended in “the first years of the 19th century.” Another late 19th century book containing biographies of important négociants had no listing for Julie, instead placing her story inconspicuously under a heading for husband, Jean.

Sexism in historical accounts and remembrances from the latter half of that century abound, effectively burying Julie’s notable and illustrative life. Until now, it was thought that Madame Jeanne Descaves, who headed Maison Descaves from 1925 to 1999, was the first woman wine merchant in Bordeaux. However, unearthing various primary sources combined with the memoire of her son Sylvester, lend us a glimpse of this Bordeaux pioneer.

Alliance by Marriage: An Unwilling Betrothal

By the time of her death at Chateau Virou, Widow Delbos and Sons was not only a top wine négociant and shipper, but also a chateau owner, banker, and concessionaire. The story of her journey into the upper echelons of the Bordeaux wine trade has a curious and telling beginning. Born Julie LaFargue, her father was a member of the Bordeaux Parliament and royal counselor. Her future betrotheds (yes, that’s two), the Delbos brothers Jacques and Jean-Baptiste, moved to Bordeaux from the Périgord countryside in 1765 and 1770, respectively. There they joined a large number of “foreigners” (non-Bordelais) seeking fortune. Though many of their wine trade colleagues hailed from other countries, these Périgourdins were almost as exotic in the urban sphere. The country bumpkin stereotype, though, belied the Delbos family’s commercial savoir-faire.

With long roots in the tiny village of Domme, the family had established a good business selling Haut-Pays wine in the 17th and 18th centuries. Seeking greater opportunity, they made a definitive transition to booming Bordeaux, Jacques when he was just 18 years old. Their father followed. The brothers became wine commissionaires, that is, international freight forwards essential to the growing commerce centered on the city.

The commissionaire is an organiser, carrying out the transport of the goods entrusted by a shipper by choosing the different required carriers and by ensuring all the administrative and customs formalities. Servicing “the arrival of several hundred ships in Bordeaux” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, notes Silvia Marzagalli, could earn substantial profits without requiring huge capital. “The needs of captains, the insurance market, and above all the commissions paid by the shipper to sell the cargo and buy the returns” presented huge opportunities for doing business with shipowners and traders. “The commission agent often provided advances on the proceeds of the sale of imported cargoes, thus enabling the captain to load the return without wasting time.”

They did well and expanded their commercial activities into wine trading and more finance, though there’s no mention of owning ships or foreign offices. By 1789, Jean was described as “living nobly.” In 1793, when the father died, he was classified as a bourgeois and negociant. The success of the firm Delbos Brothers earned Jacques enough cash to pursue a strategic alliance with a family powerful in Bordeaux political and legal circles. He entered into an arranged marriage accord, that can only be identified as strategic, with Julie LaFargue’s parents, paying a dowry of 60,000 livres (pounds).

Julie was oblivious.

Only after the marriage was in motion in 1788 did her mother her tell her about the upcoming nuptials, “for which she better prepare.” She responded with silence and resignation, having no inclination to marry, preferring to play the harp. She was 16 years old.

Fate intervened, and before the knot was tied, Jacques died.

Tutoring Angel and Revolution

This does not end the story, of course. 60,000 pounds and a beneficial alliance was in peril. On his deathbed Jacques had urged his brother, business partner, and sole heir, Jean-Baptiste, to take his place, saving their investment. With a telling verb choice, Julie’s son Sylvester recalled: “He induced her to marry him, describing to her the happiness promised in marriage for such an accomplished person.” Jean-Baptiste could have had no idea.

On May 12, 1789, “Miss Julie Lafargue married  . . . Jean Delbos, younger brother of her late pretender.”

Harp playing in the past, Jean and Julie immediately formed a business team, with acumen for acquiring assets. Jean-Baptiste “took her advice seriously,” reported Sylvester. “He introduced her to business.” She “was his guiding (literally ‘tutor’) angel and never left him” in their joint (ad)ventures.

Their marriage occurred two months before the storming of the Bastille and the same month that widespread social unrest led to convoking the Estates General, converted into a National Assembly in June. Jean counted among 321 bourgeois gathered at Bordeaux’s Hotel de la Bourse to elect eight delegates to the assembly of the Third Estate. Prospects looked bright. In early 1791, they were “residing on the front of the Quai des Chartrons, n° 44.” The same year, they bought an entire convent and its vineyard at public auction for 241,000 pounds, Le Virou, which the revolutionary government had seized, expelling its winemaker monks.

As the Revolution progressed, however, things turned ugly for negociants, and they threw Jean-Baptiste in prison, among 200 arrested in late November, 1791, at the orders of Robespierre’s agents d’Ysabeau and Tallien, for the crime of “negociantisme.” Many of his colleagues were guillotined. Through a friend named “Grammont,” he managed to escape. Julie did not stay still. Together, they hid at Saint-Andre-de Cubzac, up the Dordogne River, then returned to Bordeaux, cached at La Bastide, and eventually boarded a boat from Lubeck, Germany, “to be forgotten at Virou,” even farther upriver. Fleeing the city protected them.

Two notes: “Grammont” was surely Jacques-Barthélémy Gramont (1746-1816), who traded in tobacco and slaves through at least two companies bearing his name. He later became President of the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce from 1806 to 1809; deputy mayor in 1806; then mayor during the Hundred Days in 1815. Lubeck is a town on the Trave River and borders to Baltic Sea. “Lübeck has a very unique, quite historic, and undoubtedly obscure tradition of importing young red wines from Bordeaux by the barrel, aging them in the cellars of the city, bottling them, and branding them as ‘Lübecker Rotspon,’” which continues to this day.

Having survived the Terror, Jean and Julie quickly returned to business. They bought the expansive wine estate of Chateau Lanessan in the Medoc in 1793 for 250,000 livres payable half in cash with the other half due the following year. In the meantime, paper assignats replaced the livre. They acquitted themselves of the debt in assignats, which, due to inflation, were almost worthless by 1794. The dissatisfied seller sued and lost: “the paper money had liberatory value” decided the court.

Death and liberation

We know little else that immediately followed except that Jean-Bapsiste and Julie kept Delbos Brothers going until, on April 16, 1808 at age 55, Jean-Baptiste died. “Ms Delbos was left a widow with ten children, the eldest of whom, a daughter, was 18 and the youngest, a son, 10 months.” Not faint of heart, she burst into Bordeaux’s male-dominated commercial world, immediately changing the name of the business from Delbos Brothers to Widow Delbos (“Veuve Delbos”); “and Sons” seems to have been added sometime later.

The remotest possibility for a widow in her early 30s in 1808 Bordeaux was to stay single and head an international trading and banking firm, but that is the path Julie chose. “To assist her, she had only her eldest son, 16 years old Louis, recently out of college, but devoted, industrious and possessing the spirit and the taste for business” reported Sylvester.

The want to later paper over Julie’s personal capacity by subordinating her business acumen to that of the male Delbos heirs is unmistakable in later accounts, including that of Sylvester. Still, he did note: “one can easily imagine the meaning of the answers she had to give to the requests for marriage that were successively addressed to her. She also refused several business proposals.”

After a decade and half as her husband’s behind-the-scenes guardian angel, Widow Delbos was decidedly on her own.

The chapter “Gironde personalities and notables from antiquity to the end of the 19th Century” (Personnalités & notables girondins: de l’antiquité à la fin du XIXe siècle) of the Girond Statistics, published in 1889, had no entry for Julie. However, under that for her husband Jean-Baptiste, we find the following: “His widow continued his business with a rare capacity for commerce under the name Widow Delbos and the house never ceased to prosper under her direction and that of her sons Louis, Sylvester, and Felix.” Contemporary primary sources, in fact, point to Julie not only leading Widow Delbos to fame and fortune, but also to her constant advancement of her children’s interests. She didn’t hand direction over to her sons until the 1840s.

Felix went on to buy Chateau Palmer (from his debtor, General Palmer), where he died five years before this mother. Louis eventually took over Chateau Lanessan and by 1846 had started his own negociant firm, with a head office in London. Sylvester became the chief judge of the Bordeaux commercial court from 1838-42.

Sylvester emphasised how, early into firm leadership, Julie took on male advisers, but her choices were good: Two were her brothers-in-law, “Armand Abiet (1773-1848), a broker inclined to reduce the estimate of the goods, the other, François Delaveau (died, 1825), great winemaker, inclined on the contrary to raise it.”

Delaveau became a member of the Bordeaux Academy, which, in an 1825 eulogy, noted he “devote[d] himself particularly to the cultivation of the vine and the art of making wine.” Ravez and Maydieu were the others. Auguste Ravez was a renowned lawyer, politician, and jurist. Upon Jean Delbos’ death, he was President of Bordeaux’s electoral college and became a Deputy for the Gironde in 1816. After the 1848 Revolution he rose to become President of the Legislative Commission and member of the High Court of Justice. Maydieu was a Baron of the Empire associated with the Balaresque family, owners of the successful negociant firm H&C Balaresque founded in 1763. Son Louis married Clementine Maydieu in 1820. However, though keeping in good stead with the Empire-friendly Maydieus, Julie supported the Restoration. “Mrs. Widow Delbos saw with satisfaction her second son enter the cavalry of the royal volunteers” on March 14, 1814.

During the leadership of Widow Delbos, she managed “numerous properties” including Nos. 8, 14, 16 Quai de Chartrons (where she was born) and rue du Pavé des Chartrons, No. 33, and steered her children’s progress, which even entailed protecting them from potentially-deadly military inscription under Napoleon. In 1813, Julie paid Jean Michau to substitute for her eldest son Louis, 8000 francs over two years plus 5% interest. She then disguised Louis as a sailor and sent him on a ship to London, where he would head the Veuve Delbos office before starting his own firm.

Expansion beyond Bordeaux

Julie expanded the business far beyond what it was in 1808, fully participating in the rising international market for Bordeaux wines and its consolidation as one of the world’s great ports.

Indeed, the picture that emerges is Julie running the entire affair from Bordeaux while she sent the sons to represent specific family interests abroad and gain experience. In the 1820s, when the Minister of Commerce wrote to the firm in Bordeaux, the letter was addressed to Madame Delbos personally at Chartrons.

She internationalised operations and made serious investments in shipping capacity and infrastructure while simultaneously producing wine from two chateaux, and eventually Chateau Margaux as well. Her son Henry received passports for Italy and Odessa, for example. Her firm owned at least eight ships. In the first half of 1833, Widow Delbos had the Gabriele headed to the South Seas and California; the Clementine headed for Guadeloupe, while the Seven Brothers was already there; the Moineu going to Marseilles; the Franklin, Pioneer, and Orbit all headed to New York; the Nescopec was lost while bound for Charleston. In 1835, Widow Delbos counted among the firms paying for a concession in building the lateral canal of the Garonne, bypassing the unpredictable river over a distance of 194 km from Toulouse, where it connects with the Canal du Midi, to Castets-en-Dorthe, falling into the tidal river. It constituted an important commercial link in the 600 km route across southern France from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean

She actively pursued international law for non-payment. We find the firm listed among the creditors of an insolvent Englishman in Calcutta, where she alongside Barton & Geustier traded in indigo. Widow Delbos was also the plaintiff in a famous 1830s legal case regarding payments and bankruptcy transpiring in international financial transactions.

Writing in 1906, family biographer Bodin confirms that under the Restoration, Widow Delbos and Sons flourished, doing “gold business,” with a branch in St. Petersburg, an office in Odessa, and “relations” with Hamburg, Asia, the United States, England, Peru, and Chile (attested to by correspondence from Lima addressed to Mrs. Widow Delbos concerning the capture of a Chilean brig in 1838).

She also had a renowned salon at Bordeaux, aiding artists to sell their works. We don’t know when these salons occurred, though her son Felix brought works of Indian art, “offered to pubic curiosity,” in the city’s 1834 Exposition. Julie Delbos of rue Rolland No. 8 was a founding member of the Friends of the Arts Society of Bordeaux, with two shares. Others included the Calvets, P. Clermont, the Guestiers, Gaston de Laborde-Noguez, Edward Lawton, Count E. de Lur-Saluces, Barons Alphonse, Gustave, and Edmond de Rothschild, and the Tastets of Quai de Chartrons No. 60.

Written out of history

In 1795, when the Fumel family repurchased Chateau Margaux, it was with the aid of four Bordeaux negociants, Robert Forster, Daniel Guestier, the Johnston family, Macarthy Brothers and Henri Martin, not the Delbos Brothers. Yet by 1843, when another owner, Aguado, leased out the estate for ten years, it was to Barton & Guestier, Closmann & Cie, Cruze and Hirschfeld, Johnston and Sons, and Widow Delbos & Sons, each of which commercialised 20% of the production. Julie would not see the end of the lease.

The Delbos business had moved into the highest echelons of the Bordeaux wine trade when, in 1842, her son Francois-Felix started directing the firm followed by Jean-Baptiste-Theodore in 1845. Julie, though, remained in Bordeaux, no doubt watchful. Louis was on his own in London. In Bodin’s delicate parlance, Jean-Baptiste-Theodore “renounced” the business in 1856.

Indeed, within six years of Julie’s death, Widow Delbos and Sons was under liquidation. Ships were sold off. A public auction was announced for February 11, 1859 offering 9,354 bottles of Chateau Margaux 1851, 16,583 bottle of the 1852 vintage, 5,250 bottles of 1849 Clos d’Estournel, 356 bottles of Yquem 1847, 4,800 diverse bottles from vintages starting in 1825 for Laffitte, Marguax, Leoville, Dufort, etc. as well as 100 bottles of white wine, Madeira, Malaga, Pisco, Jerez, Malvoisie, etc. at Quai de Chartrons 16. All was overseen by the courtier Mr. Tastet.

In 1878, just a few decades later, Julie was posthumously referred to in a Paris newspaper as having been “without a profession.”

 

Charlie Leary earned his doctorate in history from Cornell University and taught briefly at Tulane University before becoming an organic farmer, artisan cheesemaker, chef, and wine director. He is now based in Panama.