Martillac, in the Graves outside Bordeaux, opened in 1999 by Alice and Jérôme Tourbier inside Château Smith Haut Lafitte, the estate her parents Daniel and Florence Cathiard had bought in 1990. It opened with thirty rooms, two restaurants and what the group calls “a Vinotherapie Spa, unique in the world”. It is this register’s clearest case of a hotel built around a vineyard’s by-product and the business made from it.
The house
The vineyard predates the hotel by six centuries. The château’s history records that in the fourteenth century “Verrier Du Bosq signed the first recorded deeds for a few vine rows”; the Scottish wine merchant George Smith bought the property in the mid-eighteenth century and gave it his name. In 1842 Lodi Martin Duffour-Dubergier, Mayor of Bordeaux and a signer of the 1855 classification, raised it to “Grand Cru exceptionnel”. Eschenauer bought the château in 1958; the Cathiards acquired it in 1990. The vines “reach 80 hectares in a single block” and carry “seven red and white grape varieties”.
The hotel is the second daughter’s business: Alice and Jérôme Tourbier “launched their first hotel venture, Les Sources de Caudalie, in 1999”, with “30 rooms, including a stilt cabin”, two restaurants and the first Vinothérapie spa. It now runs to “62 rooms and suites” across “6 houses designed as regional variations” — La Bastide des Grands Crus, Le Comptoir des Indes, La Maison du Lièvre, La Grange au Bateau, Le Village des Pêcheurs and L’Ile aux Oiseaux — plus the eleven-key Chartreuse du Château le Thil, 1.5 km off. La Grand’Vigne took a first Michelin star in 2010 and a second in 2015; in 2016 the house became what the group calls “the first French Palace hotel set in the countryside”.
What distinguishes it
The spa began in a pharmacy laboratory, not a hotel brief Caudalie dates its own start to 1993, when its founders met Professor Joseph Vercauteren, laboratory director of the Pharmacy University of Bordeaux, during the harvest at Château Smith Haut Lafitte, and were told that grape seeds contain powerful antioxidants. The first three products followed in 1995. The hotel that opened in 1999 carried what the company calls “the world’s first Vinothérapie™ Spa, at the heart of the vines”; resveratrol was patented for skincare in 2001 and Vercauteren patented the Viniferine molecule in 2005.
Two daughters, two companies, one vineyard The château’s own page sets out the division. Daniel and Florence Cathiard bought the estate in 1990. Alice Tourbier-Cathiard and her husband Jérôme run Les Sources de Caudalie and, since 2020, Les Sources de Cheverny in the Loire Valley. Mathilde Thomas-Cathiard and her husband Bertrand founded Caudalie, which sells skincare made from grape seeds and vine cuttings. The hotel is therefore one of three businesses standing on the same eighty hectares.
Eighty hectares in one block, worked as a technical exercise The estate reports its vines as a single unbroken block of 80 hectares with seven red and white varieties, roots reaching over six metres down, and a thousand barrels in the underground cellar. A gravity-flow vat room has run since 2013. In 2014 the estate installed what it describes as “the world’s first system that recycles the CO2 produced during fermentation”. Fabien Teitgen, the managing director, is an agricultural engineer and oenologist, named “Winemaker of the year according to the Guide Hachette 2021”.
The house is six buildings and a cooperage, not a hotel block The sixty-two rooms and suites are distributed among six separate houses, each built as a regional pastiche, plus a detached chartreuse 1.5 km off with eleven keys. The estate also makes nearly all its own barrels: in 1993 Daniel Cathiard hired a master cooper, and the cooperage now cites thirty years of work. Nothing about the plan concentrates guests in one place.
The stars came eleven and sixteen years after the opening La Grand’Vigne took its first Michelin star in 2010 and its second in 2015 — a decade after the spa had made the house known. The group’s own chronology places the Palace distinction in 2016 and the European Ecolabel in 2023. The order matters: the treatments established the house, and the kitchen caught up afterwards.
This is a vineyard hamlet at Martillac, not a city hotel; Bordeaux and its restaurants are a drive away, and the view is vines in every direction. A guest indifferent to wine and to treatments made from grape extract is paying for the two things the house exists to do. Those who want one building, one lobby and one lift will find six houses, a lake and a walk between them.
Signature rooms and dates
Competitive landscape
Sources
What the entry rests on, read 13 October 2026. Each reference records the facts it supports, so a disputed line can be traced to the account it came from.