Who’s Who in France

Noted expert on French wines Robert Joseph introduces the people who drive one of the world’s most significant wine countries.

Jean-René Buisson, Angélique de Lencquesaing, Michel Bettane and Thierry Desseauve, Joseph Helfrich
Jean-René Buisson, Angélique de Lencquesaing, Michel Bettane and Thierry Desseauve, Joseph Helfrich

France remains the epicentre of the wine industry. According to Vin et Société, it has 10% of the world’s vineyards and produces 17% of its wines, including the vast majority of the most illustrious labels. The wine sector employs some 550,000 people and represents roughly a sixth of the nation’s total agricultural income. All these figures, however, conceal a number of long-term trends that are less than reassuring. Competition in export markets is becoming steadily more fierce, with Chile’s and Australia’s free trade agreements with China jeopardising France’s traditional dominance in that country, for example. Domestically too, wine is a decreasing part of the Gallic daily diet. According to AgriMer figures, between 1980 and 2015, the proportion of the adult population who classed themselves as ‘regular’ wine drinkers plummeted from 51% to 15%.

Efforts have been taken to redress this situation, including the creation of a Vin de France designation allowing varietal labelling on high-volume production wines that makes French wines simultaneously more competitive in export markets and more attractive to younger French consumers. The explosive recent growth in the consumption of rosé, which now outsells white in French supermarkets, and the unprecedented success of fruit-flavoured wines, have both coincided with a dramatic reduction of the number of French women who said they ‘never’ drank wine from 47% in 2010 to 39% 2015.

However, the presidential elections this spring could bring new challenges. In a globally turbulent political moment, France is for the first time approaching a contest in which the far right Front National candidate, Marine Le Pen, has a better-than-outside chance of taking power. Le Pen is avowedly antagonistic to the Euro, and her manifesto includes a promise to hold a Brexit-style referendum.

Her campaign also has to be set in the broader context of the politicians in neighbouring countries whose nationalist/isolationist views she shares. If both Le Pen and Geert Wilders, the popular far right Dutch politician, were to come to power this year, the frictionless trade of wine between European markets could be seriously at risk. One could easily imagine a free trade agreement between Holland and South Africa, for example. Other major casualties might include bestselling domestic brands such as Castel’s La Villageoise, Vieux Papes and Cambras, all of whose wines include ‘blends of wines from the European Community’.

Among the French men and women who would celebrate an even partial closure of Gallic doors to bulk imports from neighbouring countries would be the members of the Comité d’Action Viticole (Wine Action Committee). This shadowy group that was previously known as CRAV was founded in 1970, and has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks on French wine businesses thought to be involved in importing bulk Spanish wine.

Significant officials

France’s wine industry is still very centrally controlled, and in the case of its premium and super-premium sectors, decisions are still taken by the Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité (INAO) and rubber stamped by the Minister of Agriculture. In January 2017, Jean-Louis Piton, a winemaker from the Languedoc, took over the presidency of the organisation. During his next years in office, as a producer of both appellation contrôlée and non-appellation IGP wines, and as former director of a major cooperative, Piton is expected to be particularly sympathetic to the needs of wineries in the south and south-west of the country.

Marketing

For many members of the wine industry outside France, the marketing organisation whose name will first spring to mind is probably Sopexa. But this PR company, which was once synonymous with promoting all French wine generically as ‘Food & Wine from France’, has metamorphosed since its privatisation in 2008. Today, it describes itself as an ‘International Marketing & Communication Agency’ for ‘food, drink, lifestyle’. While it represents regions such as Chablis, Burgundy and the Loire, and corporate clients such as Carrefour and Castel, it has to compete for French vinous clients with a wide array of other companies. Under Jean-René Buisson, its CEO since 2013, Sopexa is generally thought to be a more dynamic organisation than in the past.

Significant sommeliers

To judge by the results of last year’s Meilleur Sommelier de France competition, the best wine service professional in France is Gaëtan Bouvier of La Villa Florentine in Lyon. The most influential sommelier, however, is probably Patrick Fracheboud. The La Bonne Franquette restaurant in the heart of Montmartre in Paris, where he works in the setting for regular meetings of the cream of la sommellerie française.

Significant buyers

As in many other countries with developed wine markets, most of France’s wines are sold in supermarkets, especially the grande surface hypermarkets that the French helped to pioneer. Among these, the most influential is often said to be the Carrefour chain, whose shops now come in a wide range of sizes. The range of wines on offer will depend on the region in which the shop is situated, but overall decisions are made a team headed by Didier Thibaud. Given its power as a buyer, the chain’s recent growing focus on organic produce is likely to have an impact on French viticulture.

Also influential at the higher end of the price scale is the family-owned E.Leclerc chain, whose founder, Edouard Leclerc, created the concept of the Foires aux Vin – retail in-store wine fairs – at which prestigious wines, including first growth Bordeaux, are sold at dazzlingly low prices to entice buyers into the stores. Inevitably, questions are asked about how these prices are possible. Is the chain, which is now run by Michel-Édouard Leclerc, the founder’s son, selling the wines at a loss? Have the producers used the retailer as a way to dump stock? Or have the wines been purchased on the grey market? A few years ago, one high-profile producer, the late Etienne Hugel, publicly took E.Leclerc to task for the way it was advertising heavily discounted bottles of his company’s Alsace.

France’s leading specialist wine retailer, with around 500 shops, is still Nicolas, a business that was originally founded in 1822. Today it belongs to the giant producer Castel and is run by Alain Castel, nephew of Pierre Castel, the company’s founder and CEO. Online shopping is growing rapidly in France: in 2016, it represented €72bn ($76.6bn), up from €65bn the previous year – and Nicolas is clearly aiming to take advantage of this trend.

However, the heavyweight champion in this field is Vente-Privée, an online flash sales retailer founded by Jacques-Antoine Granjon in 2001, that introduced wine four years later and now has a turnover of around €30m. As with its fashion offerings, the site majors on brands – inasmuch as the word can be applied to wine – rather than the private-label model that is often favoured by this style of company. The head of the wine department is Emmanuel Imbert.
Chasing hard, though, are Patrick Bernard’s Bordeaux-based Millésima, which was launched in 1983 as a mail-order business, and Wineandco, in which it has a 50% share alongside LVMH. Both businesses’ combined turnover rivals that of Vente-Privée.

Bernard, whose cousin Olivier is owner of Domaine de Chevalier in Pessac Léognan, often features in press reports on the Bordeaux market. Another member of a famous Bordeaux family, Angélique de Lencquesaing, also frequently appears in the media, as head of the online auction site iDealwine, which she co-founded  together with Lionel Cuenca and Cyrille Jomand.

Critical opinion

As elsewhere, wine critics are losing their influence in France, but arguably more slowly than in the UK. A mention by a columnist in one of the main newspapers can still help to boost sales significantly. The best known of these is Jacques Dupont, who has been reviewing wine for the weekly news magazine Le Point for over 25 years. Another name worth noting is Philippe Barret, editor of the quarterly Le Rouge et Le Blanc newsletter.

The undisputed ‘Robert Parker of France’, however, is Michel Bettane, who has metamorphosed from prominent contributor to La Revue du Vin de France magazine to joint publisher – with his old boss at the RVF, Thierry Desseauve — of Le Guide des Vins de France. The ‘Bettane and Dessauve’ brand now covers a wide range of activities, ranging from curating sets of exhibitors at trade shows to helping companies put together wine lists.

Significant producers

When people discuss the most-influential wine producer in France, Pierre Castel’s name is inevitably one of the first to be mentioned. The eponymous family-owned business was founded in Bordeaux in 1949, and its Baron de Lestac, Malesan, Roche Mazet, Vieux Papes et La Villageoise brands have a huge market share in France. In export markets, however, Joseph Helfrich’s Les Grands Chais de France has a broader impact. The firm he launched in 1979 now exports around 17% of all of France’s non-sparkling wines. No one who has visited a major trade fair across the world can fail to have noticed the company’s imposing stands and their wide array of products. And that is what sets what is still very much a family business apart. Its range includes everything from the ubiquitous bestselling JP Chenet, whose quirky twisted-neck bottles are recognised by consumers in over 140 countries, to single-vineyard Alsaces and Loires. Les Grands Chais is also in the Bordeaux business, thanks to its acquisition of negociant companies Eschenauer, Dulong, Calvet, Alexis Lichine and Cruse.

 

 

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