Shortly into his winemaking career at the great French champagne house of Krug, Nicolas Audebert was given some advice that has served him well over the years.
“My cellar master told me that ‘we need to experiment with everything but if we don’t change anything it is better’,” Audebert recalls. “He said, ‘We must know why we are not changing’.”
It’s a philosophy Audebert took with him in mid-2014 when he was appointed by Chanel owners Alain and Gerard Wertheimer to run their two historic wine estates in Bordeaux: Château Rauzan-Ségla in Margaux and Château Canon in Saint-Émilion.
Chanel, of course, is better known for its fashion, perfumes and handbags. But the Paris maison has invested millions of euros in Bordeaux over the past two decades in the hope it can produce and market premier grand cru classé wine that’s just as celebrated.
In the last year its low-profile owners, who rarely turn up to Chanel events and do not give interviews, have started letting their wine story out. That story includes the 2015 purchase of St Supery Estate Vineyards and Winery in California’s Napa Valley, and the opening of Château Canon to invited guests, whose stay in the six beautifully refurbished bedrooms comes complete with a private chef.
'Extremely classic' wine
The subject of experimentation has come up because Audebert described the wine he makes as “extremely classic but not old-fashioned”. The problem with classic as a descriptor, he explains, is that it can “hide many dirty secrets when someone has no f---ing idea what they are doing”.
“Here we develop, we trial, we innovate and we don’t change,” he says. “We probably make the wine in a very similar way they were doing 50 years ago but we can adapt a couple of things to be more precise.”
Audebert appears like the perfect person to make wine for Chanel. Handsome, articulate and relatively young at 41, he embodies the spare-no-expense pursuit of quality that fuels the fashion side of the business. Most of his career has been spent at that other French house of luxury brands, LVMH, working for Krug, Veuve Clicquot and Cheval des Andes in Argentina, where he famously built a polo field looking out towards the spectacular Cordón del Plata mountain range.
A keen polo player himself, Audebert was lured back to his native France by the chance to run his own show at what he describes as a company with less bureaucracy and more of an “understanding of time” than many. The Wertheimers bought Château Rauzan-Ségla and Château Canon in the mid-1990s when the vineyards were in a state of disrepair. Or “almost ruined”, if you ask Audebert.
Restored glory
Under long-time managing director John Kolasa, who through 2014 and 2015 gradually handed the reins to Audebert, the châteaux were slowly but steadily restored to their former glory. The refurbishment, Audebert notes approvingly, started with the vines and finished with the buildings, which were renovated by Peter Marino, the New York architect and interior designer responsible for the private homes of Andy Warhol and Giorgio Armani, as well as for maison fitouts for the likes of Bulgari, Louis Vuitton, Ermenegildo Zegna, Guerlain, Dior and, of course, Chanel.
In keeping with the notion of “classic but not old-fashioned”, Château Canon is not stuffed full of the usual 18th-century antiques. Instead, Marino chose colourful rehabbed vintage and Scandinavian pieces, which make the place feel modern and airy despite its 256 years. Canon is not open to the public, but in recent months Chanel has invited journalists and wine writers to visit in an effort to promote the house reds.
The 2015 Château-Canon Saint-Émilion may have earned a perfect score from James Suckling, one of the world’s most influential critics, for its “‘great length and beauty”, but Audebert says no producer is immune from a “very, very competitive” market for high-end wine.
“The competition is not just Bordeaux,” he says. “The competition is Burgundy, Barolo, Tuscany or Argentina, where you can have a great bottle selling for $100.”
$200 a bottle
The 2015 Canon sells for around £120 ($200) a bottle, with 90 per cent of the estate’s production sold outside France. It seems safe to assume Chanel will have to sell out a few vintages before recouping its investment. The cost of restoring the dilapidated vines and buildings easily exceeded the initial purchase price, which ran into the tens of millions of euros. The Wertheimer brothers’ combined fortune is estimated to be almost $US20 billion ($27 billion) but it takes a special kind of patience to make a 20-year investment in an industry not known for its fat profit margins.
In recent years Chanel has purchased a tannery, embroiderers and flower growers to ensure it controls each step of the production process for its bags, perfumes and couture. Audebert says winemaking is no different when it comes to vertical integration, because “the quality of the matière première [raw materials] and having the time to transform them” is so critical.
In this spirit he has met Olivier Polge, Chanel’s fragrance creator or “nose”, to discuss making things. “In a certain way we are doing the same thing – we turn an agricultural product into an emotional thing that becomes part of the life of a person.” Not that Audebert wants to stretch the intra-company similarities too far.
“If we are speaking honestly, Chanel has no f---ing idea about wine. Chanel is perfume, Chanel is fashion or watches. The connection with wine ... never. Chanel can’t help us to make the best wine ever. But Chanel can help us to have a luxury vision of things, the understanding of time,” he says. “In Chanel globally there’s a real, I would say, trust for people. There’s a real confidence in a certain philosophy in making things. We make wine. Wine is an expression of somewhere.”
The Canon terroir
In this sense, Chanel has chosen wisely. Even by the high standards set by Bordeaux wine country, Saint-Émilion is a beautiful place, with medieval buildings and vast underground catacombs. Driving through its narrow streets in his Range Rover, Audebert talks at length about the quarrymen, monks and winemakers who built the town and helped shape the terroir that gives Canon “elegance and finesse”.
Our visit coincides with the grape harvest, which means the usual staff of about 20 employed by Chanel to make wine has swelled to more than 100 due to the “vendangeurs” who have arrived to pick the grapes. Canon is one of the few estates that still serves its seasonal workers a proper lunch, including bottles of the house red. Consequently, the château is a hive of activity as the grapes are picked, sorted and placed into vast temperature-controlled, stainless steel vats.
Audebert says technology helps him do his job, but adds that it’s just as important to be “emotionally precise”.
“We walk the vineyard here every day,” he says. “We are outside looking at what’s happening, tasting ... Our precision is based on walking the vineyard and tasting berries and saying ‘now – not tomorrow or the next day’. We do not look at what the others are doing.”
As Chanel’s new winemaker, Audebert could have been tempted to make sweeping changes to the estates. However, he makes it clear any tinkering with the approach established by Kolasa will be subtle. About 90 per cent of the quality of a Château Canon red comes from external factors such as the climate, soil quality and the age of the merlot and cabernet franc vines. Audebert regards his job as driving the final 10 per cent – the bit that makes all the difference.
“You can have the best horse,” he says. “The fastest horse ever. But if you don’t have someone sitting on it saying ‘this is the way we go’, then you don’t win.”
James Chessell visited Bordeaux as a guest of Chanel.
