Interview / Joseph Henriot: Father Figure

A man for whom preserving one’s good reputation is key, Joseph Henriot is skilled at turning around the fortunes of wine companies – and fencing around difficult questions. Margaret Rand probed his defences

There are things Joseph Henriot likes talking about, and there are things he doesn’t like talking about. You can tell them apart because if you ask him about one of the latter, you can measure in nanoseconds the amount of time it takes him to swerve to one of the former. Take this exchange, for example: he happened to let drop that William Fèvre, Bouchard Père and Champagne Henriot form just 30% of the activities of the group.

MR: “So what are the rest?”
JH: “Other activities.”

MR: “Yes, but what other activities?”
JH: “I have no idea about that.”

MR: “Oh, come on.”
JH: “Financial activities.”

MR: “What sort of financial activities?”
JH: “That’s a different story. There is nothing to write about that… What we are doing in Champagne and Burgundy for us is long-term, not dependent on our profits. We want to build something very special…”

And I never did find out, except that it takes up around one-fifth of his time (which seems quite good for something that forms 70% of the activities of the group) and that one of the things he does outside wine is being president of a club of investors “close to BNP Paribas”. They exchange ideas on the economy and how to manage assets. “It opens the mind.”

Interviewing Henriot is like this – it’s cat-and-mouse to an extraordinary degree. With the interviewer as the mouse, I should add. Henriot keeps a tighter grip on information than anybody I know, occasionally letting something out to give one the brief (and false) impression that one is in control. But he’s so amusing that one goes back for more – even if journalists rank down there with fonctionnaires and certain of his colleagues in his scheme of things.

He says he doesn’t micro-manage – “Everyday work is not my job. I would not be good at it” – but nevertheless: “One must
be extremely demanding, never satisfied. When I taste, I say, I am not asking if you like it, but would it be possible to do it better?” And that, of course, is why he produces the wines that he does.

One incontrovertible fact about Henriot is that when he takes over a company, the wines get dramatically better. When he bought Bouchard Père, he famously declassified and sold £600,000-worth of wine that wasn’t up to scratch; when he bought William Fèvre, he abandoned the vast quantities of new oak that were marring the wines. But he says there is really no story to any of this: “Happy people have no story. I am shocked to read sometimes that some winemakers or growers have invented some new story to please some stupid journalists, like cultivating vineyards with horses, or biodynamics. It’s stupid, it means nothing.

“We work seriously, I think we are professional, we have some success in Champagne; it works. In our business, to succeed you need some basic elements, what I call the winery conditions. The product itself must be from the best places. It’s impossible to build something serious if the natural conditions are not there. It is impossible to produce really unique wines in the south of France – the weather and the soil are not able to produce really outstanding grapes. But if you have the terroir, the story is not finished. If you buy a company, you have to check whether or not it has a few winery conditions to succeed. When I took over Bouchard Père, I could see they had the most fabulous collection of vineyards in Burgundy, but they didn’t take care of it.” Henriot set about investing, and he reckons, too, that in Beaune and Chablis (for Fèvre) he has “the best team I had in my life, and the two best winemakers ever in my life”.

One of his team, the much-respected Bernard Hervet, recently exited and is now at Faiveley. Revue des Vins de France suggested his departure might have had something to do with a difference of opinion between Bernard Hervet and Stanislas Henriot, the new director of the group. Not so, says Joseph Henriot: there was no disagreement with Stanislas, who is his son and runs Henriot, but “is not in charge of day-to-day business at Bouchard”. Instead, it was a decision arrived at after a long process, and one that resulted from a dispute over strategy. “He wanted to invest in Beaujolais. I said, it’s not my job. He was convinced that to develop Bouchard Père we had to accept that, in order to increase turnover, we had to produce a second-category wine to find distribution… I didn’t convince him of my strategy.” He adds that
it has turned out to be a good decision for both of them. Stanislas seems, naturally and quite rightly, to be taking over more and more responsibilities. “He is much better than I am,” says Henriot.

Both generations are entrepreneurs rather than administrators. Joseph had to join the family company when he was 21 and studying agronomy. His father died suddenly, and for three years Joseph continued his studies while working at Henriot. After that there was military service, and then came the challenge of making the Henriot brand work in a world that was not waiting for it. But he says that the brand was strong financially and, in due course, was able to take over Charles Heidsieck. “No one else was crazy enough to do it.” No one else, he adds, actually needed it, because they already had their brands. Henriot, on the other hand, could refresh it.

Then, in 1981, came a call to meet Henri Recamier, president of Louis Vuitton. Recamier offered Henriot a post as MD, and
a few years later Alain de Vogüé asked him to be the next president of Veuve Clicquot. At this point he sold Charles Heidsieck. The merger of Veuve Clicquot, Louis Vuitton and Givenchy meant that Joseph was briefly MD of all of them, with the Henriot family company being run separately.

With the merger of Louis Vuitton and Moët-Hennessy, Henriot settled for running Veuve Clicquot. It is sometimes suggested that he and Bernard Arnault, who ran Moët-Hennessy, did not get on as well as he and Recamier did; having Veuve Clicquot to run in its own niche, therefore, suited him very well. And then, in 1995, he bought Bouchard Père – and would have bought Cloudy Bay for himself as well, having previously bought it for LVMH, but it happened not to be for sale. More recently, he bought Ropiteau-Mignon, for the sake of its vineyards, having persuaded the family not to announce that it was for sale or put it on the market. His intelligence service found out about it, he says, and he didn’t believe that they would have got a better price on the open market. “My offer was a very honest offer.”

Would he like to start a vineyard of his own, perhaps in New Zealand? He looks as if the thought has occurred to him. But, “it’s difficult to be extremely small in this business – with some exceptions.” Like Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, for example, “an icon”. “Small domaines can be in trouble because of distribution. I don’t want to be the biggest company in the world, but you must have a minimum size to be in charge of your distribution. You must be strong enough to have people working for you in major markets. Otherwise, in the UK you are in the hands of, for example, Tesco, and you are in danger.”

Which brings us neatly to the subject of Waitrose, which seems to have Fèvre or Bouchard wines discounted quite regularly. “This is their job,” Henriot says, and it is “more or less agreed with Fells.”

There’s a bit of a swerve of subject then, and he starts talking about how Fells is strong in the off-trade but less so in the on-trade, and how he wants to help it develop business in the on-trade via a new structure in which Paul Symington will also be involved. But then he says that he just has to accept discounting, even if he doesn’t agree with it 100%.

Piano forte
“The other very difficult thing that we have is that we are playing on different pianos. Together we sell Montrachet at a crazy price – an excellent price – and together we sell Mâcon and so on at a very reasonable price,” he explains. “We have to adapt our strategy to different levels. It is one of the most difficult things we have to face in Burgundy. Champagne is all much closer together. But the man who buys Montrachet is not interested in Aligoté. Fine-tuning for different clienteles is one of the problems of Burgundy.”

So which is easier to sell, Champagne or Burgundy? “There’s no clear answer to that. Champagne is no longer a wine; it is a symbol of celebration, of happiness, and the arguments to consumers are not the same.”

Later he adds, “The Parker taste has disturbed a lot of people. Sometimes I am anxious. I hope Pinot Noir will not be forgotten by people who have become used to tasting huge wines. But my job is to ask questions. If it became evident that people don’t like elegant Pinot Noir, we must think about it.”

But, he stresses, he would never, ever want to jeopardise his reputation. “A friend said to me once: ‘Never forget; it is a disaster if 1% of your clients are disappointed’… In the long run, we know that the most precious element is your reputation. If you lose that, you’re finished forever.”

Curriculum Vitae
• Born 1942
• Joined Champagne Henriot 1963
• Bought Charles Heidsieck 1975
• Joined Louis Vuitton beside Henri  Recamier 1981
• Named next president of Veuve   Clicquot 1985
• Resigned to look after Champagne Henriot 1994
• Bought Bouchard Père 1995,    followed by William Fèvre
• Bought Ropiteau-Mignon 2001

© db September 2006