Generational Leadership and Sustainable Practices in French Winemaking: An Ethnographic Story of the Amoreau Family and Chateau Le Puy

By Thomas A. Maier

This book celebrates the amazing generational leadership legacy of the Bordelaise wine-growing Amoreau family. The story of Chteau le Puy goes well beyond their winemaking talent. The Amoreau family story provides remarkable lessons in leadership and enterprise management. In this book, Jean Pierre and Pascal Amoreau share their generational leadership styles and approaches through the lens of contemporary leadership philosophy, global enterprise management, and biodiverse viticulture practices found in French gastronomy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524660277

Thomas A. Maier

Dr. Maier has a Ph.D in leadership philosophy and a master’s degree in human development/international relations. He has been successful in producing several refereed scholarly publications on generational and values based leadership, hospitality revenue management and experiential learning. The focus of Dr. Maier’s research falls into two distinct categories: multigenerational leadership and revenue management. Additionally, he has co-authored textbook(s), Welcome to Hospitality: An Introduction, Third Edition, and is the ethnographer of Hospitality Leadership Lessons in French Gastronomy. Dr. Maier has been invited to speak and present at several domestic and international conferences regarding multigenerational leadership and hospitality, including the UNWTO Themis Foundation and China Tourism forums.

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GENERATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES IN FRENCH WINEMAKING

An Ethnographic Story of the Amoreau Family and Château Le Puy

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BY THOMAS A. MAIER PH.D

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© 2017 Thomas A. Maier Ph.D. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/01/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6026-0 (sc)

978-1-5246-6028-4 (hc)

978-1-5246-6027-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017900653

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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THE AMOREAU FAMILY

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IN MEMORY OF THEOLOGIAN JOHN NAVONE, S.J.

Preface

Roger Dion, the great French Historian and Geographer of the vine and wine, had once exhumed a passage from Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs by Olivier de Serres, Agronomist from the reign of Henri IV, and published in 1600¹: If you are not in a place to sell your wine, what would you do with a great vineyard?  Indeed, to dedicate oneself to monoculture of the grapevine, you have to be able to sell your wine. We must recognize that over the course of its history, the wine region of Côtes-de-Francs, referred to since 2009 by the convoluted name of Francs-Côtes-de-Bordeaux, did not enjoy the same commercial advantages as Graves, Sauternais, or Médoc, near the Garonne and Gironde rivers, or those of Saint-Émilion or Pomerol, near the Dordogne and close to the port of Libourne. On the edge of Bergerac, this wine region is the easternmost of the Bordeaux, and regardless of the potential of its terroirs, it has lived, for good or bad, in the shadow of its prestigious neighbors to the west, with none of its wines benefiting from a reputation outside the region. It’s a bit like the wines of Bergerac, produced a bit further upstream, which have always suffered under the condescending Bordeaux traders who favored the local productions which they controlled, and which came from the land holdings of a certain number of them. The most notable of these traders were also parliamentarians, and when, at the end of the 18th century the King, the governors, and intendants wanted to call into question Bordeaux’s commercial privilege, which dated back to 1241, they came up against resistance from the traders. The Président à Mortier, Antoine de Gascq, wrote to Marshall Richelieu, governor of Guyenne, in 1773: Rest assured that the parliament would rather be destroyed than suffer wines being brought down from up above. Habitually deprived of access to a wealthy clientèle and to export, the wines from up above were long sold at very low prices and did not benefit from the investments required to improve their quality, nor the talent of the best wine growers, wine makers, stockbreeders, brokers, and traders. When the happenstance of vintages resulted in successful Francs, while the Saint-Emilions were scrawny or rare, the former served as doctor wines for the latter, ending up in the company of wines from the Rhone or from Spain, which had been brought in discreetly to help out.

Thanks to Turgot, the exorbitant privilege of Bordeaux was abolished in 1776, but its consequences would still be felt long afterward. The proof of this is the famous 1855 classification established by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce, and which is still authoritative around the world today, is not based on any analysis of the potential of the terroirs, but on the hierarchy of selling prices over a century and a half ago, and therefore on the commercial talent of the owners and traders of the time. We must admit that it had and still continues heavily to have consequences, since the assurance of being able to sell a wine that enjoys a flattering reputation encourages owners to always do better, to invest, to surround themselves with the best talents, both in the vineyard and in the winery, to invite buyers or to travel the world over to spread the word about their wine. After so much effort, the wine generally ends up justifying its reputation and place in the classification, and the anomalies that reveal themselves from time to time during blind tastings discreetly go unmentioned. This too had been shown by Roger Dion. For him, the aristocratic and bourgeois wine-makers had always obtained better results than peasant viticulture. He called into question the secular prejudice regarding the wine from certain peripheral regions, like Perigord or Berry, which were not exported because, they said, of their mediocre quality, which was just good enough to be drunk on-site by undemanding consumers. Dion supported an inverse line of reasoning²: It was only bad, in reality, because it was harvested with an eye toward this local consumption. We understand that his masterwork had long been ignored, even cast aside, because he had so rocked the deterministic certainties, a supposedly immutable hierarchy of terroirs and, above all…of land revenues.

Nearly two and a half centuries after the last resistance put up by the parliament of Bordeaux, the situation has changed. Not only do wines come down from the Périgord, but one has acquired worldwide notoriety, Château Le Puy, in Saint-Cibard, thanks to the determination of the Amoreau family. They have remained on the same estate since 1610, the year Henri IV died. Considering the many vicissitudes of four centuries that have transpired since they settled there (wars, sales slumps, grapevine predators, the usual family disagreements), it had to demonstrate uncommon tenacity and imagination! Some of its members in the 20th century marked their descendants with their exceptional personality, like Barthélémy, the great-grandfather of Jean Pierre, the current patriarch. He left Saint-Cibard, learned a great deal in a very different world, and then he came home to live on the land of his ancestors for the rest of his days, full of energy and new ideas. He does not except the fatalism of history, several centuries long as it might be, nor of geography, which has no actual existence, since today wines no longer descend down rivers, and the distance to market is has no importance. The only things that count are the intrinsic quality of the vine and their evocative