![Richard Geoffroy in the Japanese garden at Tetsuya's Restaurant in Sydney. He and chef Tetsuya Wakuda are great friends.](/content/dam/images/g/s/x/a/b/x/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gsonwj.png/1480926405800.jpg)
The chef de cave at Dom Perignon on his other passion: travel.
You’ve just flown into Australia. You must fly a lot. Do you drink on planes?
No. I don’t touch alcohol at all when flying. I know from experience it’s not good for me.
How do you cope with jetlag?
I’ve tried lots of things; melatonin, adjusting to the destination time. None of them work any more so now I do nothing. I give up. I didn’t sleep a single minute last night. But you know what? On those sleepless nights, you think, you think of life. And that’s OK.
You love to travel, don’t you?
For me, travelling is crucial. It’s way beyond the professional. It’s a way of regenerating; it’s about absorbing energy from the outside. I believe in the landscape. Man makes the landscape and the landscape makes the man. If you’re stuck in the kitchen you dry out. To me, drying out is the scariest thing in life.
Is it the people or the places that help?
The people. Our lives operate in concentric circles. First place is my family and friends. Then there’s the circle of correspondences. In life you are looking for correspondences, the links, the bridges. I’m driven by that quest.
Your worlds are very entwined.
My passion is my commitment to Dom Perignon. I’ve been expanding it into many personal projects but always with that central mission. It’s not office hours, it’s one life. In Peru recently I ran into a chef and it was just instant, the connection. I’m intrigued by those arches of correspondence.
Peru is a hot food destination right now.
Yes. It’s all about the diversity, of vegetables, of influences. It’s so gifted in ecological diversity, it was inevitable that one day the level of food preparation would rise to that.
Are they big champagne drinkers?
No but the food, its complexity, the harmony of preparations – it’s bound to happen.
Were you in Peru for work?
Officially but it was also a personal project, to meet up with Gastón Acurio, the leading figure in Peruvian food. This guy is immense, as important as Alain Ducasse is to France or Ferran Adrià to Spain. He’s beyond food; he could be in politics, run for president. He’s been putting the country on the map.
What’s your project with him?
We’ve been coming up with universal principles; the links, bridges. There’s always an element of religion, traditions, weather in a country’s cuisine, but above that are principles which dictate the whole thing.
What are the principles?
They are really all about harmony. I’m a great believer in harmony.
We associate harmony with Japan, one of your favourite countries.
I think I’ve been there more than 60 times. It’s not necessarily an easy culture to enter, there’s something impervious to it, yet once you puncture that, you realise that it’s one of the most passionate cultures on the planet.
The Japanese Australian chef Tetsuya Wakuda is a great friend of yours.
Yes, I’ve known him for 30 years. I often joke that he’s my soul brother. He’s in Japan as we speak. He’s extending his stay for a day so we can meet up. Typical Tetsuya.
And you’re a big fan of sake.
I’ve a fascination for these guys being able to transform dry rice grains into liquid miracle. If you leave grapes on the bench they will ferment, but if you leave a bag of rice on the bench I guarantee you very little will happen. To come up with turning rice into wine, 1000 years ago … It’s so unlikely.
Sake and champagne: any similarities?
As far as processing, very little. As finished products, a lot. They both have apparent approachability yet great depth and content, well above the shared function of drinking.
You started work life as a doctor. Is that the other path you might have taken?
Yes, although as a teenager I would have loved to go for architecture. There’s always been that element of architecture in the way I create the wines. I don’t know many winemakers who think in relief; there’s an element of construction in what I do.