Champagne house Maison Louis Roederer is to buy Diamond Creek Vineyards in Napa Valley. The acquisition comes less than a year after Louis Roederer bought Merry Edwards in Sonoma County.
Xavier Barlier, vice president of marketing and communications at Louis Roederer, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the purchase was “a long-time dream for the Roederer family”, and that the late founders of Diamond Creek – Al and Adelle ‘Boots’ Brounstein – had been friendly with the Rouzaud family, owners of Roederer, since the late 1990s.
According to the same report, Boots Brounstein had been talking about a possible sale with Roederer’s president Frédéric Rouzaud before she died in 2019, aged 92.
Diamond Creek was founded in 1968 by Al Brounstein of Minnesota, who became the first California winemaker to charge $100 for a bottle of wine. Boots Brounstein once said her husband had fallen in love with wine later in life, taking his first wine class aged 40.
One of his great innovations was to plant on Napa’s slopes, rather than on the valley floor, as was done at the time. The Brounsteins went further, creating vineyards according to soil type. Today, Diamond Creek is one of the region’s most highly regarded wineries and is devoted exclusively to Cabernet Sauvignon.
The Diamond Creek acquisition is just the latest for Louis Roederer, which now has a significant portfolio of prestige wineries. The company owns Deutz in Champagne, Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande and Château de Pez in Bordeaux, Domaines Ott in Provence, Delas Frères in the Rhône Valley and Ramos Pinto in Portugal, along with Roederer Estate in Anderson Valley, California and Merry Edwards, Sonoma.
“[California] is a region that has created notoriety, quality and very interesting developments,” Rouzaud told Le Figaro in 2019. “Contrary to what has been achieved in France where notoriety is based on appellations, the approach to wine is freer in the United States. You are free to plant your vine wherever you want. The market will be the sole judge.”
Louis Roederer also bought its first hotel, the Christiania in Val d’Isère in the French Alps in 2018.
“Ultimately we should be able to create a wine tourism network of hotels from our own estates,” Rouzaud told Le Figaro. “There is great potential.”
Louis Roederer was founded in 1776 and has been in the same family since the 19th century.
