From bolts of cloth to a family name on the label.

Bouchard Père & Fils is a wine house in Beaune, the wine town of the Côte de Beaune in Burgundy. Its story begins not with wine but with cloth. The company says Michel Bouchard, a cloth merchant, settled in Beaune in 1731, the date the house still gives as its founding; English Wikipedia also describes the firm as established by Michel Bouchard as a cloth merchant in 1731.

The move into wine came with the next generation. The company says Michel’s son Joseph became his partner in 1746 and took over the business in 1750; English Wikipedia says that from 1746 Joseph began selling wine and acquiring vineyards. According to the company, Joseph bought his first vines in 1775, parcels in the Pommard premier cru Les Combes, which it counts as the start of the family domaine. English Wikipedia, citing a family genealogy, says the name “Bouchard Père et Fils” — father and son — was adopted in 1785, with Joseph’s son Antoine-Philibert-Joseph.

The house’s best-known address followed in the nineteenth century. The company says that in 1820 Bernard Bouchard became the owner of the Château de Beaune, a fortress it describes as built by Louis XI, and that the family turned its underground galleries and bastions into cellars for ageing wine. The house says it set up its headquarters on the Rue du Château in 1872, that the château has been listed on France’s supplementary inventory of historic monuments since 1937, and that its cellars still hold bottles from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the oldest dating from 1846.

For more than two and a half centuries the house stayed with the family whose name it carries. That changed in 1995, when the Bouchard family sold the firm to Joseph Henriot, head of the Champagne house Henriot, English Wikipedia says, citing The New York Times in 2004; the company puts it as the Henriot family taking the helm of Bouchard Père & Fils in 1995, and says that from 1996 Joseph Henriot added further vineyard land.

From the Henriot group to Artémis Domaines.

Under the Henriot family, Bouchard Père & Fils became one of several houses held by the group Maisons & Domaines Henriot. By 2022 that group owned Bouchard in Burgundy, William Fèvre in Chablis, the Champagne house Henriot and Beaux Frères in Oregon, Wine Spectator reported.

The next change of owner came in the autumn of 2022. Wine Spectator reported on 4 October 2022 that François Pinault’s Artémis Domaines, the owner of Château Latour in Bordeaux, was buying a majority stake in Maisons & Domaines Henriot, with the Henriot family becoming minority shareholders in the combined company. The magazine said the deal had already closed, that Frédéric Engerer, managing director of Artémis Domaines, would oversee all the wineries, and that a supervisory board would be chaired by Gilles de Larouzière Henriot, then chief executive of Henriot.

The house describes the same event in its own words: in 2022, it says, the domaine “united” with Artémis Domaines. Its site today names Frédéric Engerer as chief executive of Artémis Domaines, Emmanuel Dumont as chief executive of Bouchard Père & Fils and Mickaël Baroin as technical director, and says about eighty people work at the domaine.

Where the wine is made has also moved with the times. The Burgundy Report wrote in March 2007 that the Bouchard team had moved into a new winery in Savigny-lès-Beaune, the village just north of Beaune, with room for some two hundred vats and thousands of barrels, while the Château de Beaune remains the house’s headquarters and cellar, the company says.

The vineyards have changed too. The company says the decision to convert to organic farming was taken in 2009, and that from the 2025 vintage all of the estate’s plots are certified organic.

Design and documentation.

The seven names in this group are all Burgundy houses and domaines: Louis Jadot, Joseph Drouhin, Bouchard Père & Fils, Louis Latour, Faiveley, Albert Bichot and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Burgundy wine names in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to estates that now belong to much larger groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a wine shop to a restaurant list.

A Burgundy 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 or leased 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 grown, made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the house or domaine 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.

A family name, a fortress and a new owner.

The name itself is the brand’s oldest asset. “Père & Fils” means father and son, and the house has kept the name through three owners: the Bouchard family until 1995, the Henriot family from 1995 and Artémis Domaines from 2022. The second constant is a place. The company’s site opens on the Château de Beaune, which it says the house has owned for more than two centuries, and on the underground galleries where its wines are aged.

The ownership story needs some care with names. Artémis Domaines also owns Château Latour, the Pauillac estate in Bordeaux; that château has no connection with the Beaune house Louis Latour, which remains a separate, family-owned company. Nor should Bouchard Père & Fils be confused with other Burgundy businesses that share the Bouchard surname; the house’s own site is bouchard-pereetfils.com.

For a design guide, Bouchard Père & Fils shows how a merchant’s family name, a castle and nearly three centuries of dates can carry a wine house through changes of ownership without changing what the label says. Compare Louis Jadot and Joseph Drouhin, two more négociant houses of Beaune. For this guide we use Beaune burgundy, old gold and limestone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bouchard Père & Fils’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.