When he was 20 years old back in 1999, Basile Tesseron of Château Lafon-Rochet, a classified growth in Saint-Estèphe, decided to leave: “Bordeaux was boring, conservative and unfashionable,” he said. Instead of taking over from his father, Michel Tesseron, he travelled across the US and South America, working in restaurants and other jobs.
Now in his mid 30s, with three children, Basile Tesseron directs Lafon-Rochet with pride. Lafon-Rochet will open a new boutique in January 2016 to welcome the general public, seven days a week – quite rare for Bordeaux. Just as neighbour Montrose had done amid much fanfare (and expense), Lafon-Rochet is modernizing its cellar. Tesseron explained how 22 stainless steel vats have been replaced with 18 new stainless steel and 18 new temperature-controlled concrete vats in a wider variety of sizes and shapes that enable parcel-by-parcel vinification. “All this goes together,” he said. “We improve winemaking and share this with people who love wine in a welcoming setting.”
The old Bordeaux image dies hard. Forbes reported in October this year on “What to know before you go to Bordeaux”. Most wineries do not have dedicated tasting rooms like those in Napa or Australia, and appointments are mandatory or you risk showing up to find no one, according to the article. Forget about weekends.
Changing times
This year, premier grand cru classé Château La Gaffelière in Saint-Émilion this year began €20.00 ($21.30) per-person wine tours. Not just on Sundays, but also on bank holidays – in English, French and Spanish.
In nearby Lalande-de-Pomerol, Paul Goldschmidt of Château Siaurac launched a wine tourism program in September, including Sunday brunches at his 12-hectare garden, with a Jardin Remarquable rating from the French ministry of culture. Guests can stay overnight and enjoy gourmet dinners. “We must open our doors to the public,” Goldschmidt said.
That has been the message from Bordeaux’s tourism office since 2005, when Sophie Gaillard was hired to encourage châteaux to be more open to the public. Now, she says, there are some 2,500 rooms available for tourists at châteaux in Bordeaux – including the five at Siaurac. “There were far less when I started,” she says.
The tourism office has worked with Bordeaux wine associations like the Conseil des Grands Crus Classés en 1855 to set up wine tours. The tourism office proposed only four wine tours to châteaux when Gaillard arrived. Today 60 exist. Conseil director Sylvain Boivert sent Meininger’s a list of 25 estates with boutiques when this article went to press, but many more are being planned. “Ten years ago, I would have counted at best ten,” says Boivert.
Bordeaux deputy mayor Stéphan Delaux tells Meiningers: “We have become a tourism capital; that was not the case ten years ago.”
To encourage châteaux to be more open year-round for tourism, the mayor’s office touts a study – Evaluation de l’impact économique du tourisme sur l’agglomération de Bordeaux – that surveyed 1,320 tourists in Bordeaux from May 2014 to April 2015. Over half named wine tourism as their second choice for visiting. One in four tasted wine in the city. Non-French tourists spent the most money on gastronomy and wine tourism: on average a non-French tourist spent €91.00 per day as opposed to €63.00 for French tourists. British tourists spent the most, at €109.00. In the study period, nearly 6m people visited Bordeaux.
Pioneers set stage
Gaillard praises wine tourism pioneers such as Philippe de Rothschild of Mouton Rothschild, the Cazes family at Château Lynch-Bages and, later on, the Cathiards at Château Smith Haut Lafitte. “Early on the Cathiards set up a restaurant, lodgings and spa for tourists for the Graves region,” she says. “They blazed a trail.”
When Florence and husband Daniel Cathiard arrived at Smith Haut Lafitte in 1990, Florence recalls: “At that time none of our neighbours were ready to open estate doors even on weekends.” Today, Florence Cathiard is president of the Oenotourisme French Council, where she initiates projects nationwide – and she is “very happy” with how Bordeaux has improved its wine tourism.
The Bordeaux tourism website has a new section called the top 10 restaurants of Bordeaux châteaux, which includes Le Manège, a recently opened restaurant of Château Léognan in Pessac-Léognan.
Taking a lead from such top estates as Montrose and Margaux, which had earlier unveiled new cellars in spectacular fashion, Les Carmes Haut-Brion in Pessac hired world famous designer Philippe Starck and architect Luc Arsène-Henry to create a sleek, new cellar that resembles a moored boat. The €10m project extends over 2,000 square metres, with a barrel cellar and grape harvest reception room, a tasting room and panoramic terrace overlooking the entire estate. Representative Stephanie Libreau said that a boutique for tours and tastings for the public should be operational at the beginning of 2016.
Another example is the opening this summer of a luxurious bed and breakfast within a renovated château by Robert G Wilmers, owner of the famous Château Haut Bailly. After purchasing Château Le Pape in Léognan back in 2012, he hired 15 local craftsmen, among others, to renovate the gorgeous 18th-century Chartreuse, including the painstaking recreation of a second tower. A landscape artist redesigned the grounds with an elaborate garden and swimming pool. Greeting guests and managing the estate is Hervé Audibert, trained chef and culinary director, who had managed the personal kitchen staff of Château Margaux and worked at Michelin-rated restaurants in France. It is like a five-star hotel in a pastoral vineyard, but very close to both the Bordeaux airport and central train station.
Libreau and Anne-Sophie Brieux, communications director at Haut-Bailly and Le Pape, agree that plans by the French national railway to shorten the train ride from Paris to Bordeaux will benefit wine tourism – and increase visits to their respective estates. When opened in 2017, the Bordeaux-Paris route is expected to take 50 minutes less, down to 2 hours and 24 minutes from 3 hours and 14 minutes.
Renovation transforms quality and image
Much has been said in the media about spectacular unveilings of new cellars at Château Margaux, designed by British architect Sir Norman Foster, and some €60m spent by the tycoon owners of Château Montrose to transform the cellar space into a massive model of environmental sustainability. Both estates celebrated these changes over elaborate dinners at Vinexpo this year. A Keeping Up With The Joneses mentality permeates Bordeaux estates, as similar renovations – if not always on such grand scales – grow like so many autumnal mushrooms.
For many years Château Pédesclaux in Pauillac was dubbed Château Pedestrian. Real estate mogul Jacky Lorenzetti bought it in 2009, determined to improve quality and image. The château is now covered in glass with a new cellar built to showcase more precision in winemaking, with different-sized vats to mirror parcel selections. Over lunch at the château during Vinexpo this year, professionals felt that the 2012 was better than the 2009 and 2010 vintages, because of better winemaking. Shortly afterwards, a widely read article in The Washington Post dubbed Pédesclaux “the most underrated Bordeaux château”.
At Château Beychevelle in Saint-Julien, work started for a 1,600-square-metre cellar space in February 2015 and should be ready for the 2016 harvest, says director Philippe Blanc. Cranes and excavations greet drivers entering Saint-Julien on the D2. “A practical measure,” says Blanc. “Our previous installation was good, but with concrete vats dating 50-years old and stainless steel between 15 and 30, the owners [Suntory and Groupe Castel] wanted to bring a breath of fresh air.”
Blanc does not use the word “competition” with neighbours, but says visitors, journalists, professionals and “just worldly people” are coming to Bordeaux more often: “They see how some estates look more advanced than others, so it is difficult to give the impression of being behind the times. In addition to the technical aspect of renovation, there is also a communication dimension.”
That dimension includes a new welcoming area (the estate welcomes up to 20,000 people per year, albeit only six days a week), a boutique and a tour of the grounds, with regular art exhibits. In 2012, the estate hired a hotel professional, Christine Pinault, who had worked for the Le Méridien hotel in New Orleans, and managed the nearby landmark property, Madewood Plantation, to manage 13 renovated rooms with for guests who want to experience a stay at the château.
But much work remains, visitors say. When Brussels-based Euronews talk show host and Bordeaux fan Chris Burns arrived this past August with his family, the city of Bordeaux was “great” but almost every château was closed for tastings, let alone visits. “It was not welcoming,” he says. “We came at the drop of a hat, so it may have been better to have called in advance,” he added. “But people take holidays in August, so you would think that estates would have staff to welcome visitors.”
La Cité du Vin
To make itself a world wine tourism region, Bordeaux is opening an €81m non-profit centre, La Cité du Vin, in June 2016. Shaped like a giant carafe, the building will have a light golden colour to echo Bordeaux’s famous limestone façades. Director Philippe Massol says that the centre will welcome tourists in eight languages – English, German, Italian, Japanese, French, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese – and a wine bar will feature wines from 80 countries and wine regions throughout the world.
An accredited charitable organization since December 2014, the centre’s primary purpose will celebrate and transmit the cultural, historical and intellectual dimensions of wine, Massol explains. Some 25% of funding comes from charitable donations that are tax deductible up to 60% of the amount donated. “It is the first time that a cultural centre in France will be supported by so many private company donations,” Massol said.
He is confident that the initiative will survive where others – like Copia in the Napa Valley – failed because “we are going to be in the very centre of Bordeaux, just on the bank of the Garonne River.” Copia “may have been a bit too high-brow” too, he said. The Cité du Vin will attract general tourists as well as more wine savvy audiences. The €20.00 per adult admission will include a wine tasting at the top of the building and a general tour, with animations, decorations, documentaries and dioramas of wine past and present.
