A barn, a captaincy and a replanting.

Château de Beaucastel is a wine estate at Courthézon, in the Vaucluse, best known for its Châteauneuf-du-Pape. English and French Wikipedia, citing the estate’s own figures, say it holds about 130 hectares of land, of which about 100 hectares are vines, three-quarters of them within the Châteauneuf-du-Pape appellation.

The name is older than the wine. The estate says its story began in 1549, when Pierre de Beaucastel bought a barn at Coudoulet, and English Wikipedia says that land is still part of the estate’s holdings. French Wikipedia, citing the historian Robert Bailly, says the Beaucastels were Protestants in the principality of Orange, and the estate says that in 1687 Louis XIV named a descendant, also called Pierre de Beaucastel, captain of the town of Courthézon. French Wikipedia says the family sold its titles between 1727 and 1792, when Étienne Gontard claimed the property; in 1832 the Gontard holding covered 30 hectares, of which only 36 ares were vines.

The modern estate dates from the phylloxera years. English Wikipedia says that when the vine pest struck, the owner, Élie Dussaud — an engineer who, French Wikipedia says, had worked with Ferdinand de Lesseps on the Suez Canal — chose to sell rather than replant. In 1909 the estate was bought by Pierre Tramier, under whom the vineyard was rebuilt. His son-in-law Pierre Perrin, whom the estate calls a man of science with very high standards, took over after him and, English Wikipedia says, expanded the vineyard considerably. The property has stayed in the Perrin family since.

Thirteen grapes and a son’s homage.

Jacques Perrin ran Beaucastel until 1978, when his sons Jean-Pierre and François Perrin took over, according to both English Wikipedia and the estate. Speaking to Decanter in 2014, François Perrin credited his father with championing local grape varieties and following biodynamic principles in the 1970s. The estate says the family farmed organically from the 1950s and biodynamically from 1974.

Beaucastel is known for using all 13 grape varieties traditionally permitted in red Châteauneuf-du-Pape, with Grenache the leading grape and, English Wikipedia says, an unusually high share of Mourvèdre. The American importer Robert Haas wrote in 2014 that he asked to represent the estate in the late 1960s because of its use of Mourvèdre and Roussanne and because it was taking up organic farming, and that he became its importer in 1970. The estate says each variety is picked by hand and fermented separately in wooden or concrete vats, and that the wines then spend a year in large oak casks; English Wikipedia calls them foudres, large old barrels.

The range is short. English Wikipedia lists the red and white Château de Beaucastel; the white Roussanne Vieilles Vignes, a single-variety Roussanne, rare in the appellation; the red Hommage à Jacques Perrin, made only in better years; and the red and white Coudoulet de Beaucastel, Côtes du Rhône wines from vines just east of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape boundary. Decanter reported that the brothers created the Hommage with the 1989 vintage, in their father’s memory.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Rhône and Alsace wine houses: Guigal, Chapoutier, Paul Jaboulet Aîné, Château de Beaucastel, Trimbach, Hugel and Zind-Humbrecht. Wine houses in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family estates that still carry a founder’s name to houses that now belong to larger groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a wine shop to a restaurant list.

A wine house’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, bought new vineyards or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the house says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Courthézon to Paso Robles, and a cellar of earth.

The family’s wine business now reaches well beyond the château. Robert Haas wrote in 2014 that by 1971 Jean-Pierre Perrin, a graduate of the oenology school in Dijon, had started a small merchant business at Jonquières under the brand La Vieille Ferme. English Wikipedia says the family also runs a négociant business for other southern Rhône wines, Perrin & Fils, separate from Beaucastel, and Decanter reported in 2014 that the Perrins had bought vines in villages including Cairanne, Gigondas and Rasteau.

In California, Jean-Pierre and François Perrin founded Tablas Creek Vineyard at Paso Robles with Robert Haas in 1990, English Wikipedia says, citing Stephen Brook’s The Wines of California. Haas wrote that the partners began looking in 1985, bought land with calcareous clay soils in the Las Tablas district, brought vine cuttings from France through a quarantine station in Geneva, New York, and began planting in 1995. When Decanter named Jean-Pierre and François Perrin its Men of the Year for 2014, it said their work reached from Provence to the US West Coast; French Wikipedia says Marc Perrin took charge of the vineyard at Château Miraval in Provence. In 2006 the family and the estate joined Primum Familiae Vini, an association of family-owned wine houses, English Wikipedia says.

The newest chapter is architectural. Decanter reported in April 2025 that a project begun in September 2018 — when the family commissioned the consultancy Because Architecture Matters to run a competition that drew entries from 300 firms of 32 nationalities — had produced a new winery and cellar by the Indian practice Studio Mumbai, working with Studio Méditerranée from the south of France. Much of the new wing is underground; its outside walls are pisé, rammed earth made with clay dug on the site; and the Mistral wind is channelled over rainwater reservoirs to cool the winery to 12°C, the magazine said. César Perrin told Decanter he planned to receive the 2025 harvest there. The estate names seven members of the fifth generation, among them Marc, Thomas, Charles and César.

For a design guide, Château de Beaucastel shows how a 16th-century family name, a set of thirteen grapes and a building of earth and stone can carry one identity through five generations of another family. Compare Miraval, the Provence estate linked to the Perrins, and Guigal, another family name of the Rhône. For this guide we use Mourvèdre red, garrigue green and galet cream with an old-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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