ABSTRACT
From the ancien régime until the phylloxera crisis, the wine market in the Anjou valley was organised by négociants. The small number of accounts books kept by René-Jean Goubault-Lambert between 1810 and 1848 and the abundance of accounting documents kept by the Maison Ackerman-Laurance, which cover more than a century (1830–1980s), shed light on the practices that characterised the history of viniculture in the Anjou region. Deposited in the archives of the département of Maine et Loire (France), these documents reveal, first, the failures of négociants who in the 1840s did not inspire the confidence required to perpetuate their Maison. Goubault-Lambert went into liquidation, but Ackerman-Laurance survived and then expanded rapidly. Its accounts books reveal some of the keys to this 19th-century success story à la française.
