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Château Rouquette

March 2008: 10th Anniversary Reflections

It is almost exactly ten years ago that we first stumbled upon Rouquette. Love at first sight, we had bought the property by May 1997. 17 months later I gave up my job as an investment manager in London and my wife and I moved to France.

The next two years were busy as we sorted out a vineyard with an excellent reputation but which had been run down for ten years under the previous owner. In June 2001 I wrote a newsletter on the changes we had made, finishing with my favourite quotation by Baroness de Rothschild – “Running a vineyard is easy. It is only the first 100 years which are difficult”. However, by 2002 we were making broadly the sort of wine we wanted and entered our first competition, the Concours de Bruxelles. To our amazement we were one of only 25 wines out of 3800 from around the world to win a Grande Médaille d'Or.

Building new wineries for temperature controlled vats and barrels, getting new advisors and reintroducing hand picking were very visible things that we put in place quickly. The last five years have seen more subtle changes as we have slowly fine tuned the small details that make the difference between a good and an excellent wine.

We are often asked what lessons we’ve learnt during this process. Some of the main ones are:

•  When we were looking for a vineyard to buy, several people quoted the old adage: “How do you make a small fortune with a vineyard? Start with a big fortune!”. In fact, we have had a positive operating cash flow every year since we started, despite the difficult conditions of the last few years. We have gradually built up the Rouquette label but have continued to sell more than 80% to a negotiant who bottles and markets the wine under our second label. It takes time to build up distribution and those who bottle and try to market all of their production themselves, from the beginning often seem to have problems.

·       The importance of marketing. It sometimes seems now that making the wine is the easy part – selling it is the difficult bit. With 10,000 vineyards in Bordeaux alone, competition has got tougher and tougher. The Bordelaise sometimes seem not to realise they are operating in a global market and their continual production of large quantities of poor quality wine drags down the many vineyards that are producing excellent wine.

·       The importance of the vineyard. This is the single most important thing to get right and it takes a lot of time for changes to work. A new vineyard takes three years before it produces any wine and up to ten years before it starts producing a good quality.

·       Don’t under estimate the power of the state, in it’s various forms, to muck things up! I could probably write a book on this subject alone and it is the single thing that has shocked me most working in France. Dictates handed down often seem to lack logic and are often detrimental to the improvement of the quality of the wine. The farmer used to be a privileged worker in France and they used to say that a good President needed to know the back end of a cow! This was probably due to the importance of their vote. As recently as 1964, 20% of French employees worked in agriculture at a time when the same figure in the UK was 2%. Now only 4% of the French workforce is on the land and their vote has become marginal.

Apart from coping with the bureaucrats, living in France is a pleasure. The quality and dedication of many of the people we work with is impressive as is the depth of knowledge. After London, living with nature and following the cycle of the seasons is therapeutic. Instead of the gyrations of the stock market we have had to deal with the surprises the weather has brought, but this has also stamped its character on the wine with each vintage memorable for different reasons. And there is little to beat sitting outside on a balmy summer evening, with just the sound of the cicadas, and drinking a glass of wine, which came from the surrounding vineyards.