The history of Château Canadel dates back from the Roman times. The preventive archeological excavations that have been carried out before the construction of the cellar in 2013 revealed an ancient Roman villa, equipped with an olive oil press and wine tanks.
Afterwards, the estate belonged successively to the Abbaye of Saint-Victor de Marseille and to the Counts of Provence until the end of Middle-Ages. The hill was fashioned into terraces in order to grow vines, olive trees and orchards.
The 5 houses that form the estate were built successively between the 13th and the 15th century. Their layout reminds of a small village, around the chapel and the water canals that gave their name to the estate: “le canal d’eau”, shortened in Canadeau and then with time became Canadel.
Between the 15th and the 20th century, Canadel changed hands three times but the estate itself seems to have remained unaltered as shown in a 1683 deed of sale: “there are old and new vines, as well as some olive trees (…), the land is very arduous and very steep, held in place by strong and long walls whose maintenance is highly costly”
After the major phylloxera epidemic that devastated French vineyards at the end of the 19th century, the estate has been reconstituted and replanted with vines exchanged with some of the big historical vineyards of Bandol. The grapes were then grown for the supply of the Ott estates.
In 2007, Jacques and Caroline de Chateauvieux fell in love with this heaven on earth and bought the domain with the ambition to produce Château Canadel wines. It also became the new home of their family, freshly returning from Reunion Island.
In 2009 they handed down the running of the estate to their daughter Laure Benoist, agricultural engineer, and her husband Vianney Benoist, agronomist and oenologist. For five years they shaped the domain and built a new cellar to give birth to a new estate in Bandol.
The first bottle of Château Canadel saw the light of day in 2014.
