Friday May 1st
To Anne Howard for lunch at Masquieres on the edge of the Cahors wine country. The English called Cahors the black wine because of its tannin content making it taste sharp and strong. Anne lives in a house on the Earl of Leicester’s estate at Holkham Hall in Suffolk but likes to spend at least four months of the year at this charming house in the Lot et Garonne.
It’s May Day and a holiday in France. There are flower markets in every bastide market town we pass through - Issigeac, Villereal, Monflanquin and finally Tournan d‘Agenais where we bought lavender and climbing roses for the new house.
One of Anne’s guests is Nick Ryman the former owner of Chateau Jaubertie just up the road from our new house in the Bergerac wine growing region. I sat next to Nick at lunch so was able to get acquainted with this doyen of Bergerac wines. An Old Etonian, Nick said that before he left school his ambition had always been to own a vineyard in France. When his father sold the Ryman chain of stationery shops he toured the French wine areas in his Bentley. The Bouche de Rhone was too hot, Touraine not far enough south, he was not “over enamoured” by Bordeaux so he bought Chateau Jaubertie in the Bergerac wine region.
Bergerac wine, he told me, was not well known outside the region and nobody in England had heard of it. He told me he had improved both the quality and the image of the wine. Nevertheless he said he lost the best part of £1m in the venture so he sold the chateau to his son’s French father in law. After the price was agreed the buyer tried to short change him by 50000 euros. Nick was having none of it and walked out refusing to sell. The buyer relented and coughed up but Nick, who is retired, hasn’t spoken to his in laws since.
A few days after meeting Nick Ryman I read in the local newspaper about another foreign wine grower who had suffered a sadder fate. The Sud Ouest in its May 6th edition carried a report on its front page about a young American called Robert Adler whose vineyard had gone into liquidation.
A former banker, Adler resigned from his job and left America with his wife and children to live in the Dordogne and realize his life’s ambition to grow high quality wine. In 2002 he bought Le Chateau Bellevue at Thenac near Bordeaux. He came to live permanently there with his wife to realise his dream of working on the land to produce what the Sud Ouest called “sang de la terre” the blood of the soil.
Sadly the dream came to an end in 2006 with the loss of a valuable harvest due to bad weather, staff problems and a dip in wine prices. Two years later his wine business went into liquidation and he was ordered to grub up his precious vines.
In an effort to recoup some of his losses Robert Adler advertised his wine at 20 centimes a bottle – “less than a bouchee du pain”. The liquidator judiciaire, Pascal Pimouget deemed this to be an insufficient price. Instead the liquidator stated that if a buyer for the American’s wine couldn’t be found by September then it would be sold at auction.
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Hello Avon,
ReplyDeleteAfter our conversation this morning i checked out your blog and was horrified to find a huge inaccuracy with regard to your reporting. The article incorrectly stated that:
“In an effort to recoup some of his losses Robert Adler advertised his wine at 20 centimes a bottle – “less than a bouchee du pain”. The liquidator judiciaire, Pascal Pimouget deemed this to be an insufficient price. Instead the liquidator stated that if a buyer for the American’s wine couldn’t be found by September then it would be sold at auction.”
This was simply not the case. I would never sell a bottle of my wine, a product which I created with my own hands, at a price so insulting low that it doesn’t even cover the cost of an empty bottle on its own. In addition, if wine were ever sold at this price it would have a serious detriment to the entire Bergerac market for wine, (I received this offer derived and constructed by the liquidator himself, for not a bottle but some 50,000 bottles).
So outraged that I received such an offer, and spurred on by the fact that the judge agreed with Maite Pimouget, I had no choice but to engage my lawyers to ‘annuler’ the contract and fight like hell. My position was clearly defendable and I was eventually assisted by the syndicate of Bergerac Winemakers and also the Confederation des Paysans, Jose Bove’s organization who commonly defends a more just price for farmer’s products.
I hope you understand my anger when I read just such an error in the truth. If not corrected, you stand to do a grave injustice to all those that fight corruption and nepotism.
Lastly, your article suggested that I some how engineered to sell my wine as some sort of last ditch effort to generate revenue. This is somewhat ridiculous as the entire sale would have generated 10,000 euros, exactly equal to less than two palettes of wine at my previous wholesale price realised just six months earlier (the equivalent to just 1177 bottles). Finally, when putting in context the value of the other assets of the society, selling my wine at these ridicule prices would have obviously been absurd.
I kindly ask for you to revisit the facts and take the time to correct your undue and misleading article.
Sorry to sound off…
Kind Regards, Bob
My understanding of the facts are that since the point in time when the French courts and delegated court officials have taken control of Bob's vinyard, the vinyard's assets, tractors, wine, specialised equipment have been sold off by the courts at a tiny fraction of the assets value. I think this is an indictment of the French bankruptcy practises. No prospective small business owner will want to create a new business when upon experiencing any difficulties the courts will cause the assets to be sold off without any real attempt to get a fair price for them...
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