Anthony Barton
Winemaker who transformed quality at his family claret estates Léoville-barton and Langoa-barton
ANTHONY BARTON, who has died aged 91, was a descendant of one of the so-called “wine geese” – Irish merchants who put down roots in France in the late 17th and early 18th centuries – and the urbane doyen of Châteaux Léovillebarton and Langoa-barton in Saint-julien in the Médoc.
According to legend, the first Irish immigrants to France were defeated Jacobite soldiers, Catholics who followed the Stuarts into exile. Some were, but many others were merchants who went to France to seek their fortunes.
These included Anthony Barton’s direct ancestor, Enniskillen-born Thomas Barton, a Protestant, who arrived in France in 1722 and, first at Marseille and then Montpellier, established himself as a trader. He arrived in Bordeaux in 1725 and amassed a fortune trading brandy for Irish wool. By 1743 he was a major buyer and exporter of fine wine and the owner of a vineyard at St Estèphe.
During the French Revolution, Thomas’s grandson Hugh was imprisoned in a Carmelite convent and subsequently fled to Ireland, leaving the family négociant business in the hands of a trusted French manager, Daniel Guestier, who became an official partner in the business in 1802.
Returning to France, in 1821 Hugh acquired Château Langoa at St Julien, an estate with a single-storey château, built between 1757 and 1759, later described as combining “the very best of French and English taste, both in the gardens, and its beautiful interior”. In 1826 he bought part of the nearby Château Léoville estate.
Both were wine-growing estates, allowing Hugh to produce and sell his own wine as well as exporting for other producers. The 1855 classification ranked Château Langoa as a third growth and Château Léoville-barton as a second growth.
The two estates have remained in Barton ownership ever since – and are the oldest Bordeaux-classified growths still owned by the same family. Not even the Rothschilds can trace their involvement with Bordeaux as far as the Bartons.
Anthony Barton was the eighth generation to live and work in Bordeaux. Tall, dashing and well-connected (he was godfather to Princess Margaret’s daughter, Lady Sarah Armstrong-jones), he had moved to France in 1950, when the estates were run by his uncle Ronald, to work for Barton & Guestier, which was sold to Seagram in the late 1960s, and later for his own export company.
In 1983 the 81-year-old Ronald Barton, who had been a jealous proprietor of his estates (and, though married, had no children), was prevailed upon by his bank manager, for tax reasons, to transfer the St Julien properties to
his nephew, and on Ronald’s death in 1986 Anthony and his Danish-born wife Eva moved into Château Langoa.
While Ronald Barton had rebuilt the prestige of the Léoville-barton and Langoabarton names in the postwar period, building up the market for his wine, particularly in London, he disliked change and had resisted such new-fangled ideas as bottling his wines at the château.
Anthony overhauled and updated the cellars and vineyards, installing the latest machinery and introducing a regular vine replanting programme, transforming the underperforming estates into some of the finest in the Médoc. In 2007 Decanter magazine named him “Man of the Year”.
Known in wine circles as “the gentleman of Bordeaux”, Anthony Barton held out against the charge-what-themarket-will-bear approach so prevalent in the Bordeaux market in recent years, deliberately charging less than his rivals for his en primeur offerings for new vintages. “I don’t consider our wines underpriced,” he told an interviewer in 2007. “I don’t want to play this game of always competing with my neighbours… We’re making a very good living as it is. How many new cars can anyone buy after each vintage?” Nor did he have much truck with the more highfalutin aspects of wine
connoisseurship, the wine writer Hugh Johnson noting how “when the pleasantries of tasting turn pretentious, a thing not unknown in the grander châteaux, the tall saturnine Anthony pricks the bubble.”
One story told how, when asked by two visiting US wine writers to describe one of his wines, in desperation Barton looked out of his window and, seeing some rose bushes that needed pruning, replied: “I’d say, faded roses.” Later on, noticing his red setter had taken a dip in a pond, he declared that the wine tasted of “wet dog”. He was delighted a few weeks later when the descriptions were published in a serious wine magazine.
Anthony Barton actually liked people to drink his wines. In 1988 he told an interviewer that he had recently been accosted by a wine investor who had bought cases of wine which had not increased in value as much as he had hoped and asked Barton for his advice: “I told him to add to his investment – to buy a corkscrew.”
Unlike the other “wine geese”, the Bartons retained and renewed their connection with Ireland, where Anthony Frederick Barton was born on July 7 1930, the younger of two sons of Captain Derrick Barton and Joan, née Lecky, at Straffan House, Co Kildare, which had been built on the family estate in Ireland in 1832 by Hugh Barton.
The Barton family were originally English settlers in Ulster in the plantation period at the beginning of the 17th century.
Anthony’s father was the older of two sons of Bertram Barton, who had inherited both the French and Irish estates, but lived in a manner which took little heed of increasing costs and taxes or the fact that provision made for younger sons and daughters by various Bartons had drained much of the fortune built by “French Hugh”.
After Bertram’s death in a hunting accident in 1927 his property was divided between Derrick, who inherited the Straffan estate, and his brother Ronald, who got the French vineyards and Château Langoa. Bertram’s share in Barton & Guestier was divided between them.
Anthony was educated at Stowe, then read Modern Languages at Jesus College, Cambridge, for two years before being asked to leave for showing insufficient “academic disposition”.
The Barton estates had been left in an economic mess by Bertram, and while Ronald Barton managed to put the French estates on an even keel postwar, Derrick’s fortunes never recovered. Despite demolishing more than half of Straffan House to cut costs, in 1949 he sold it and moved to a suburban house in Dublin.
His eldest son, Christopher, emigrated to Australia, while Anthony moved permanently to Bordeaux to work in a lowly capacity for Barton & Guestier. In 1955 he married Eva Sarauw of Copenhagen, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Barton did not get on with the new dominant shareholders when most of Barton & Guestier was sold to Seagram, and left in 1967 to form his own company, Les Vins Fins Anthony Barton, in which he was later joined by his daughter Lilian.
After inheriting the vineyards Anthony and Eva Barton were generous hosts at their château, entertaining friends and business associates four to five times a week. Barton himself travelled frequently to Northern Ireland and to London, where he enjoyed trips to the ballet at Covent Garden. He also took an annual fishing trip to Norway.
In running the operation Barton was ably assisted by his daughter Lilian, dividing their responsibilities between the vineyards and the merchant business, where they were joined after Lilian’s marriage by her husband, Michel Sartorius.
In 2010 Anthony Barton transferred his estates to Lilian, his son Tom having died in a road accident. The next year she and her husband bought Château Mauvesin Barton, in the Bordeaux region of Moulis-en-médoc. They and their two children continue to be involved in running the Barton estates.
Anthony Barton, born July 7 1930, died January 18 2022