Florence and Daniel Cathiard met on the French national alpine ski team, built the Go Sport retail chain, sold it in the late 1980s, and spent the following three decades turning Château Smith Haut Lafitte into one of Pessac-Léognan's benchmark estates. In January 2020 they bought the 220-acre former Flora Springs property on the western edge of Rutherford, at the foot of the Mayacamas, and renamed it for the family. The site's stone gravity-flow winery was built by the Rennie brothers in the 1880s, sat abandoned as a ghost winery, then passed to Louis M. Martini in 1933 and the Komes family in the late 1970s. The Cathiards cut production from roughly 670,000 bottles a year to about 62,000, with Justine Labbé as head winemaker supported by Smith Haut Lafitte's Fabien Teitgen. Daniel died in January 2026 at 81.