The wine goose flies back

Roz Crowley meets Pierre Lawton, a globally acclaimed wine merchant, whose long line of Cork ancestors includes a mayor

Pierre Patrick Lawton was born in 1958 with a sip of Mouton 1945 on his lips. “As I understand it Dad finished the bottle. Hence, my taste for this wine,” said P Lawton on a recent visit to Cork.

It’s the county of his forefathers, going back eight generations, starting with Abraham Lawton whose family owned a substantial package of land near Skibbereen and another near Buttevant in County Cork. He went to Bordeaux in 1739 to establish the wine-broking house of Tastet et Lawton. It wasn’t easy for a Protestant family to settle in the predominantly Catholic Bordeaux. They were kept outside the walls of the city in a type of ghetto which is now the prestigious Quai de Chartrons. Abraham, a Protestant, had six children with Charlotte Selves, a Catholic who had to convert to Protestantism before eventually being granted permission to marry.