Cruse family

The Cruse family is a well-known French Protestantwine-merchant family from the Bordeaux region of France. Family members also own several renowned wine estates.

In 1815 Herman Cruse, a Danish–German merchant from Segeberg, now in Germany but then part of the Duchy of Holstein under the Danish Crown, settled in the Bordeaux region of France, where he co-founded the firm Cruse et Hirschfeld in 1819. With financial support of his wife, he cornered the Bordeaux market in 1847; that year's harvest turned out to be excellent, and he made a fortune. In 1850, the firm Cruse et Hirschfeld came under the sole control of the Cruse family and was renamed to Cruse et Fils Frères. Cruse developed the firm with the help of his three sons to one of the major wine-trading companies in Bordeaux.

Next to the flourishing wine-shipping business, Herman Cruse set out to diversify and invest in wine-growing estates.

The first winery acquired by Herman Cruse, in 1852, was Château Laujac in Bégadan, Gironde, in the heart of the Médoc area. The estate has remained in the hands of the Cruse family since; since 1962 it is being managed by Herman's great-great-grandson Bernard Cruse, as is the adjacent estate of Château Laffitte Laujac.

In 1865, Herman Cruse purchased Château Pontet-Canet, a renowned wine estate that had seen better times. He quickly modernized the facilities at Pontet-Canet and built a subterranean wine cellar. The wine was not bottled at the estate, and sold in large quantities without vintage label to the French railways company.

In 1973, the Cruse family lost Château Pontet-Canet when a wine fraud was discovered in which cheap table wine was turned into expensive red Bordeaux by falsifying the records. The ensuing scandal forced Cruse to sell the estate in 1975 to Cognac merchant Guy Tesseron, owner of Château Lafon-Rochet.

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Wikipedia