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Barton left his châteaux to his daughter Lilian, now the ninth-generation ownerThe last male descendant of a great
Anglo-Irish wine-making family in
Bordeaux, Anthony Barton loathed the
tendency for fine wine to be treated as
a financial investment rather than
something to be drunk and enjoyed. An
American wine merchant who had in-
vested a fortune in this way sought his
advice one day about when he should
sell it. “Instead of selling it I suggest you
invest a little more,” Barton said. “A
mere $20 or so.” The puzzled merchant
asked what he would get for a mere
$20? “A corkscrew,” came the reply.
Barton owned two of the leading
classified growths — Châteaux Léo-
ville Barton and Langoa Barton. He was
also a roving ambassador for the pro-
motion of bordeaux throughout the
world. A tall, dapper and clubbable
man, he had one of the highest profiles
of any of the leading Bordeaux wine
owners. He was also one of the few to
live in Bordeaux full time in the family
château.
His family links to Bordeaux
stretched back 300 years, when
“French Tom” Barton from Co Fer-
managh arrived in the region and be-
came a prominent négotiant, that is,
negotiator of wine deals. His grandson
Hugh fled the French Revolution but
returned to purchase Château Langoa
Barton in 1822, along with the more
prestigious Château Léoville Barton in
- Both estates are the oldest Bor-
deaux-classified growths to still be
owned by the same family.
Anthony Frederick Barton was born
in 1930 at Straffan House in Co Kildare,
which was built in 1832 by Hugh Barton.
Growing up in Ireland, Barton rarely
encountered wine, as his parents pre-
ferred beer and whisky. After Stowe
School in Buckinghamshire, he studied
modern languages at Jesus College,
Cambridge, for two years before being
asked to leave for not showing “suffi-
cient academic disposition”. His elder
brother Chris was the heir to Straffan,
but when their father sold it in 1949
most of the money went to pay off
debts, and Anthony moved perma-
nently to Bordeaux.
Nobody lived in the sizeable château
at Langoa Barton, which was used only
at weekends and during the harvest.
Barton noted that the rooms were full
had taken 30 years for Anthony to have
any say in the production of the two
wines.
He immediately threw out the an-
cient de-stemming machines and
brought in temperature controls and
more new barrels. He also hired a new
regisseur (manager) from a neighbour-
ing property, which resulted in signifi-
cant improvements, especially with the
1985 and 1986 vintages. This culminat-
ed with the international success of the
1989 Léoville-Barton vintage, which,
much to Barton’s pride, was the wine
served in 2002 for the Queen’s Golden
Jubilee celebrations at the Guildhall.His wine was also served at the 100th
birthday party for the Queen Mother.
In 2007 Barton was chosen as
Decanter magazine’s man of the year
and in 2019 the Wine Spectator, Amer-
ica’s leading wine magazine, named his
2016 vintage of Léoville Barton as wine
of the year. Apart from improving the
overall quality of the wine, the other
important development was deliber-
ately charging less than his rivals for his
en primeur offerings for new vintages.
He commented that too many vintners
in Bordeaux equated price with pres-
tige but said that was not a game he
wished to play. “I don’t consider ourwines underpriced. I don’t want to play
this game of always competing with my
neighbours. That’s all about vanity and
doesn’t help the image of Bordeaux. If
Léoville Barton seems cheaper than
many other top second growths, it
doesn’t bother me. We’re making a very
good living as it is. How many new cars
can anyone buy after each vintage?”
This approach was highlighted by the
price levels of the 1997 vintage, which
was a poor one, especially in the wake of
the highly successful 1996 vintage.
Despite this, most château owners
raised their prices, while Barton cut
Léoville Barton from £395 for the ’96 to
£250 for the ’97. He was proved right as
merchants declined to buy wines at the
inflated prices and bought them later
heavily discounted.
Barton refused to alter the style of his
wine to suit contemporary tastes such
as those of the critic Robert Parker, who
promoted heavily extracted “fruit
bombs” over the traditional style of
claret. He quipped: “There is more
pleasure in drinking light vintages at
the right time than great vintages at the
wrong time.”
He travelled frequently to Britain,
especially to attend the ballet at Covent
Garden, and went salmon fishing every
year to the same river in Norway. Short-
ly after his retirement a decade ago, he
heard that his friend, the Danish wine-
maker Peter Vinding-Diers, was dining
that night in a London club. On the spur
of the moment, he asked if he could join
them and caught the next flight from
Bordeaux to London.
Perhaps learning from his treatment
at the hands of his uncle, he arranged
for the transfer of his estates to his
daughter Lilian some years ago, his son
Tom having died in a road accident.
In 2011 she and her husband, Michel
Sartorius, purchased Château Mauves-
in Barton, in the adjoining Bordeaux re-
gion of Moulis-en-Médoc. Their two
children, Mélanie and Damien, are in-
volved in running the Barton estates,
making them the tenth generation of
Barton descendants to be involved in
the Bordeaux wine trade.Anthony Barton, Bordeaux winemaker,
was born on July 7, 1930. He died on
January 18, 2022, aged 91history” and announced a national day
of mourning. “We couldn’t have won
the election without Olavo,” Eduardo,
one of Bolsonaro’s sons and also a poli-
tician, said in 2019 at a screening of a
film about Carvalho at the Trump
International Hotel in Washington.
“Without Olavo there would be no
President Bolsonaro.”
Carvalho exercised his influenceof cobwebs and spiders: “Whenever I
turned up, I was told not to touch the
curtains, as Ronald was convinced one
good tug would bring them crashing
down.”
Ronald Barton did not permit his
nephew to work at the wine estates,
instead placing him in the négotiant
business of Barton & Guestier, which
had been founded by Hugh Barton in- Ronald Barton told Anthony to
forget the idea of working in the vine-
yard because “the vineyard is where we
lose money and the négotiant office is
where we make it”. Even here, he was
not responsible for the sale of either
Léoville Barton or Langoa Barton, but
made money by selling “off-dry” white
to the Finnish wine monopoly. He con-
ceded that “it was fairly nasty stuff, but
they couldn’t get enough of it”.
The cellar at Langoa Barton, mean-
while, had a vast range of vintage bor-
deaux and champagne and after con-
suming different bottles of the magnifi-
cent 1900 vintage he developed a
passion for bordeaux. However, he hat-
ed life in the region until he met Eva
Sarauw, who was a Danish nanny. He
married her in 1955.
Eventually, Barton & Guestier was
partly sold to Seagram, but Barton did
not develop a good working relation-
ship with the new dominant partners
and he was sacked in 1967. He immedi-
ately formed a company called Les Vins
Fins Anthony Barton, which special-
ised in selling the leading bordeaux
wines. To make matters worse, due to
an earlier binding contract, he was not
allowed to sell his family wines until the
late Seventies.
This coincided with his daughter Lili-
an joining him in the business. To his
continued frustration, there was still no
planned handover of the estate, so it
was only after the intervention of
Ronald Barton’s bank manager that he
grudgingly handed over control to
Anthony in 1983, thus avoiding crip-
pling inheritance and taxation issues. ItIn 2007 he was chosen
as man of the year by
Decanter magazine
Olavo de Carvalho
Right-wing polemicist who helped to propel President Bolsonaro to power in Brazil and downplayed the Covid-19 pandemic
Jair Bolsonaro displayed four books
during his first speech after being
elected president of Brazil. On the table
were the Bible, the Brazilian constitu-
tion, Memoirs of the Second World War
by Winston Churchill, and The Least
You Need To Know To Not Be An Idiot by
Olavo de Carvalho.
The latter tome, a collection of essays
published in 2013 by one of Brazil’s most
prominent far-right polemicists, was
something of a guidebook for Bolsona-
ro as he rode a populist wave to power
in 2018. A self-proclaimed philosopher,
Carvalho had for years espoused the
kind of bellicose anti-establishment
conservatism embodied by Bolsonaro.
Few paid much attention until the
country was roiled by corruption scan-
dals and economic woes in the mid-
2010s, and Carvalho’s audience grew
amid disillusionment with the govern-
ing left-wing Workers’ Party. At pro-
tests the slogan “Olavo is right” became
a rallying cry for the disaffected.
Bolsonaro appointed several Carval-
ho disciples to his cabinet and acknowl-
edged his debt to the ideologue after his
death. The president declared him “one
of the greatest thinkers in our country’s
from afar. He moved to the United
States in 2005, finding kinship with its
cultural and religious conservatism,
democratic values, embrace of free-
market economics, advocacy of indi-
vidual gun ownership, small-govern-
ment ethos, contempt for communism
and cradling of conspiracy theories.
“Rednecks are the best people in the
world,” he told Americas Quarterly
magazine. A compulsive smoker, Car-
valho settled in rural Virginia, where he
lived with an English mastiff named Big
Mac in a home decorated with portraits
of Confederate generals and a car in the
driveway that bore a “Commie Hunter”
bumper sticker. A visiting reporter from
The Atlantic noted a workspace
crammed with more than a hundred
pipes, thousands of books and at least 20
rifles. Carvalho travelled to Maine for a
hunting trip with the goal of shooting a
black bear and developed an affinity for
cowboy hats.
Online he published essays, held
seminars and nurtured a large, devoted
following as he promoted falsehoods
such as the theories that Barack Obama
was born outside the US and that Pepsi
was sweetened with the cells of abortedfoetuses. The Trump presidency was
more to his taste and he is said to have
met repeatedly with Steve Bannon, the
former White House chief strategist.
Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho was
born in 1947 in Campinas, Sao Paulo
state, to Nicéa (née Pimentel) and Luiz, a
lawyer. He is survived by his wife, Roxa-
ne Andrade de Souza, who was one of his
students, and eight children.
He left school before the age of 16 and
studied philosophy and religion by
himself. Briefly active in communist
circles in the Sixties, he began a career
in journalism and later taught and
wrote about astrology, which he
believed should be a serious academic
discipline. A climate change sceptic
who said he did not rule out the possi-
bility that the Earth was flat, Carvalho
issued dire warnings of the dangers of
“cultural Marxism” and a globalist plot
to install a new socialist world order,
with Islam, feminists and gay rights also
in his crosshairs. So too was Bolsonaro’s
vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, a re-
tired general and relative moderate
whom Carvalho considered “an idiot”.
Though he often cut an avuncular
figure in his YouTube videos — bespec-tacled, waving a pipe and perched in
front of bookshelves — his rhetoric was
frequently profane and combative. “It’s
not about destroying ideas, but destroy-
ing the careers and the power of
people,” he once said. “You have to be
direct, and without respect.”
Like Bolsonaro, whose government
was slow to acquire vaccines, he down-
played the coronavirus pandemic,
which has killed more than 625,000
people in Brazil. Carvalho called con-
tainment measures the “most enor-
mous and sordid crime” ever commit-
ted against humanity.
In May 2020, he said that “the fear of
a supposedly deadly virus is nothing
more than a little horror story designed
to scare the population and make them
accept slavery as they would a present
from Santa Claus”.Olavo de Carvalho, polemicist and
conspiracy theorist, was born on April 29,- He died of lung disease on January
24, 2022, aged 74, after contracting
Covid-19
Carvalho was a compulsive smokerAnthony Barton
Dapper and uncompromising Anglo-Irish winemaker whose estates are the oldest in Bordeaux still owned by the same family
Email: [email protected]