In 25 years, Florence Cathiard and her husband Daniel have built Château Smith Haut Lafitte into one of the best-known wine brands and tourist destinations in Bordeaux. Before buying the chateau in 1990, the Cathiards were both members of the French Olympic skiing team and owners of the highly successful Genty-Cathiard, and Go Sport retail chains. In 2014 she was made chair of France’s National Wine Tourism Council and was given the Prize for Global Economic Influence, an award made for “people or initiatives committed to promoting France’s cultural, economic, linguistic and humanitarian influence globally”.
MEININGER’S: How did Daniel, your husband, and yourself come to own a chateau in Bordeaux?
CATHIARD: We met in the French ski team where Daniel was a champion member of the same team as Jean-Claude Killy. But in 1970, his father died suddenly and we had to take over the family supermarket business, Genty. It was very hard work – we didn’t ski for ten years – but we had a certain success over 20 years, ending up with over 300 supermarkets and hypermarkets and the Go Sport sports goods chain. We loved wine – and only drank red Bordeaux – and in 1990 we decided to sell the businesses and focus on the thing we both loved.
MEININGER’S: Were you influenced by what you saw in other countries before you invested in Bordeaux?
CATHIARD: We often went to the US to buy ski gear and other products for our shops, and we were blown away by the quality of their retailing. In fact, we almost bought a wine estate in Napa. It would have been very different, but we would have adapted to it. And we certainly admired the estates we saw there.
MEININGER’S: Do you think that the fact that you were outsiders helped you when you arrived in Bordeaux?
CATHIARD: I think it helped us a lot. The region was very different in those days. I prefer the Bordeaux we live in now to those times – it’s 1,000 times better, thanks to the change of generation. I may be old enough to be the mother of many of the people running chateaux today, but I have much more in common with them than with their parents. When we first came here, we were treated as grocers. We were the first to open our doors to visitors at weekends – no one did that in those days and doing so was not very well regarded. And we were caught up in the battle between the appellation’s wine producers and the Bordeaux Unitec technology park in Pessac. The chateau owners didn’t like the new buildings and the idea of a technology centre close to the vineyards. We actually had a cru classé delegation visit us to ask us not to make the region ‘ridiculous’ by supporting the park. But we thought it was good for the region.
In fact, it was the researchers from Bordeaux Unitec who often came to visit on Sundays and if it hadn’t been for one of those visits – by a polyphenols specialist – the Laboratoires Caudalie cosmetic business might never have been born.
MEININGER’S: Almost from the outset, tourism was a big part of your programme. Why was that? And why did so few Bordeaux chateaux follow your example?
CATHIARD: When you want to shake things up, you don’t have a choice. You have to do something different. But the situation for our neighbours was different. In those days, the chateaux were often owned by families with lots of children, and lots of jealousy and battles between them over what each got from the estate apart from a few cases of wine. The chateaux were often empty and if one member of the family passed by and saw one lit up at a weekend, they simply thought that another member of the family was taking advantage of it… Today’s generation is very different. It’s not the same families – often the estates belong to big companies – and the young people are far more professional.
MEININGER’S: Your own background was in advertising. Did that give you a different view of brands to some of your neighbours in Bordeaux?
CATHIARD: Yes, I had my own agency that I sold to McCann, where I then worked as a European vice-president; I was in charge of the global campaigns for Rossignol skis, and that gave me an understanding of brand names and the importance of strong brands. I remember making a presentation in which I questioned the naming of the Pessac-Léognan appellation, which sounded to me like a Paris metro station and made no sense to anyone from outside the region. The only person who really understood what I was saying was Bernard Magrez of Château Pape Clément, but fortunately the Americans shortened the name to Pessac, which sounds a bit like Pauillac, so it all finished well. But when the people who were responsible for those things were thinking of names of appellations, no one thought of the end user. Fortunately, those ivory tower days are over now.
MEININGER’S: There are three businesses: the chateau, the Les Sources de Caudalie hotels and spas, and the Laboratoires Caudalie cosmetics. How much symbiosis is there between them?
CATHIARD: From the outset, we’ve worked as three separate couples – we’ve been very lucky with our two sons-in-law – each of which runs a separate business. Daniel and I have the wine; Alice Tourbier-Cathiard, and her husband, Jérôme, manage the Les Sources de Caudalie hotels and spas; and Mathilde Thomas-Cathiard and her husband Bertrand manage Laboratoires Caudalie. When celebrities – and we get quite a few – come to the hotel, we don’t involve them in the wine unless they are interested in it. And around half the people who come to the hotel have no interest in wine at all; they are there for the food and/or the spa treatments. But there are some who really are knowledgeable about wine, such as Paul McGuinness, manager of U2.
MEININGER’S: Which are your strongest overseas markets?
CATHIARD: We are much better known in the US and Asia than Europe. When we arrived, it took a long time for the British critics and merchants who made the weather in those days to realise that the chateau no longer belonged to Eschenauer, which had produced large amounts of pleasant but rather light wine. And we were very unlucky with the weather for our first vintages, after the frost of 1991, we had the harvests of 1992, 1993 and 1994. Even Robert Parker took time to understand that Smith Haut Lafitte had been bought from Eschenauer. Then Parker discovered us and we were accused of making ‘Parkerised’ wines, even though as long ago as 1995 we changed our winemaking style. We have Stéphane Derenoncourt and Michel Rolland as consultants but with Fabien Teitgen, our technical director, we hate woody wines.
Anyway, while we travel a great deal and have a brand ambassador in Hong Kong and are often in the US. Next year, we’ve decided to focus a lot of attention on the European press, to build their understanding of our wines.
Every year, at the beginning of September we choose where we are going to do most of our marketing. Last year, it was actually the negociants; we discovered that, unlike some of our neighbours, we are far closer to our consumers than the people who actually sell our wines. So we hosted tastings for the Pessac-Léognan and Graves appellations during the 2014 en primeur campaign that brought 4,000 professionals through our doors over four days.
MEININGER’S: How is the Chinese market working for you?
CATHIARD: We have been lucky. We are the other Lafite, so we haven’t been too touched by the anti-corruption campaign that has caused problems for some chateaux. But awareness of the Caudalie cosmetics have helped us a great deal throughout Asia, as has the reputation of the hotel and its food. Alain Juppé [mayor of Bordeaux] said to me recently that Bordeaux is brilliantly placed for Chinese visitors. They don’t want to sunbathe on beaches; they are looking to learn and to get involved. We may not get them to help us to pick grapes but they do want to know every detail of the winemaking process.
MEININGER’S: How have you built those relationships with consumers?
CATHIARD: It’s not just consumers, it’s also professionals from different countries. We discovered that while most professionals naturally like to spit, some prefer to taste fewer wines without spitting, so we just opened a second tasting room where they can do that. It’s the same as with the restaurants. We’re celebrating our second Michelin star in the main restaurant and hope that will bring us more customers, but my daughter has also opened a new more casual tapas restaurant where all the wines are sold by the glass and customers can buy the ingredients – all locally produced - to take away with them and enjoy at home.
Naturally, we have mailing lists: 2,000 professionals and 5,000 consumers, all of whom receive Christmas cards every year. The hotel has its own database, but we keep that separate from the chateau’s lists.
MEININGER’S: When your daughter and son-in-law launched the Laboratoires Caudalie cosmetic products, why did you not use the Smith Haut Lafitte brand?
CATHIARD: We have always kept the businesses separate, but they help each other and there’s plenty of cross-fertilisation between them.
MEININGER’S: You have joined forces with the Moulin family, owners of the Galeries Lafayette retail chain, to buy chateaux in neighbouring appellations. How important do you think it is to offer a range of different wines across different parts of Bordeaux?
CATHIARD: We’re very much the minor partners, helping out friends we have known for 30 years. Being part of a group of estates isn’t something we needed for Smith Haut Lafitte because it’s already a brand, but it will be useful for the other chateaux.
MEININGER’S: You recently launched a Sauternes to drink with Perrier. That’s a shocking idea for Bordeaux surely?
CATHIARD: Sauternes is not making money and its future is not great; it’s a drink for older people. We wanted to create a drink for younger people – not a dry Sauternes, but one they can enjoy in smart nightclubs where you never normally see Sauternes. SO Sauternes is a lighter style made from the young vines of first-growth chateaux and has been launched in top clubs and bars like Le Bon Pêcheur in Paris. And Perrier is very much part of the story, funding a big part of the promotion.
MEININGER’S: Your reward for the success of Smith Haut Lafitte as a tourist destination has been a role heading up a campaign to improve wine tourism across the whole of France.
CATHIARD: It’s an unpaid three-year job, and I’m already so busy that I’m having to say no to so many requests for things people want me to do. Anyway, somehow I found that I’d taken on the tourism role, but Daniel says it will teach me diplomacy! It has certainly brought me into contact with Brussels and government ministers like Laurent Fabius, who has actually been the best French official for wine in a very long time: the first to be happy to be seen as a “man of the year” for La Revue du Vin de France. So, I’ve been fighting against European abolitionists who think of wine as being like vodka and French politicians who tried to stop any mention of wine in the media. Apart from the lobbying, one of the things I’ll be most happy to have achieved when I leave this post will be helping to build 50 wine routes across France’s wine regions. They all have between five and 20 places to visit that are not necessarily all to do with wine. So, in Provence, the route includes the wonderful Dentelles de Montmirail, and in Burgundy, there’s the Abbey of Cluny. Each route has to give tourists what they are looking for; there have to be places to eat and stay and we’ve turned down proposals where the places to visit are too far apart. We’re also working on a multi-language website that brings together all of France’s wine tourism offerings. France had 10m to 12m wine tourists last year and we hope to double that in five years.
MEININGER’S: How much use do you make of social media for Smith Haut Lafitte?
CATHIARD: We have a communications manager, Rémi Marty, who is responsible for everything we do online, so all of the en primeur activities and tasters’ comments for example were on twitter and we send out newsletters to our database.
MEININGER’S: What are the biggest changes you have seen in 25 years?
CATHIARD: It’s a lot more complicated. In the past, it was easy - we had King Parker plus a few emerging names. Today, you have to be more active and you have to watch what’s going on everywhere: everybody is on their smartphones.
I’m lucky that our daughter Alice and her husband are very much part of that world, thanks partly to being in the hotel and restaurant business where online comments can have a huge effect. All their friends seem to be bloggers and on social media and they understand the importance of the lifestyle media as a whole.
MEININGER’S: What have you learned personally from the last 25 years?
CATHIARD: The wine business is becoming more open to women, but that hasn’t really affected me personally because I was always a tomboy. My parents treated me like a boy, and as a skier I did downhill rather than slalom which was usually thought to be for girls. I don’t like the idea of ‘feminine’ wine, but I do believe that women are better at details than men, and they always say that the devil is in the detail. We also have more sensitive noses but we’re less solid when it comes to tasting. Twenty-five samples is a good number for me.
