This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
News
INTERVIEW: Something in the heir
After many hands-on years running Champagne Roederer, Jean-Claude Rouzaud can now relax and enjoy the fruits of his success, as he passes the day-to-day management of the firm to his son Frédéric. By Margaret Rand
Jean-Claude Rouzaud is looking a lot more relaxed these days. The tension you used to feel coming off him seems to have largely evaporated – or perhaps has transferred itself to his son, Frédéric. And why? Because Jean-Claude has retired from managing Champagne Roederer and is now president. Frédéric has taken over the hot seat. Frédéric has already had one rather ludicrous spat over comments he made about hip-hop stars and their Cristal habit, which proved simply that he is his father’s son: 10 years ago Jean-Claude told me that he wasn’t over-keen on stars drinking Cristal, though he didn’t mind Claudia Schiffer doing it. (Mind you, P Diddy was spotted canoodling with a model at a party at Jean-Claude’s Corsican house last July, so perhaps he’s changed his mind.)
Roederer, unlike Moët with Dom Pérignon, has never been an instinctive seeker of bling. It’s indicative of a modesty – an austerity, even – that runs right through the Rouzauds, and has done for generations. Jean-Claude’s grandmother, who took over the company in 1933 when it was nearly bankrupt and had 25 years of stock in the cellar, was a tough, unsentimental woman who paid herself very little and put everything back into the company. Jean-Claude also ploughed profits back: 15-20% of net profits used to be distributed as dividends to the shareholders (his father and two cousins), the rest went into the bank. Shareholders were discouraged from seeking more. When Jean-Claude felt like buying another company, like Ramos Pinto Port, or Deutz Champagne, or a brace of cru bourgeois châteaux in Bordeaux, he paid cash. “Everything I have done,” he says, “I could do because nobody else was controlling the money.” His long-term idea was that if one big shareholder, or even two, decided to pull out, there would be enough cash to pay them off; or, at worst, he could sell one of the other companies. Roederer would not suffer. Given the number of French family wine companies – Château Pichon-Lalande, for example – that have had to be sold in such circumstances, this was a very good strategy. And who bought Pichon-Lalande? Why, Roederer.
Jean-Claude never went to business school – instead he studied oenology and viticulture at Montpellier – and everything about running a business he had to learn on the spot. He bought companies that took his fancy, and they were always family companies that fitted in with the Roederer philosophy. Buying Ramos Pinto, for example, was definitely an eccentric decision. Ramos Pinto kept afloat by selling Cutty Sark whisky in Portugal. The Ports were certainly good, and the family charming, intelligent and fascinated by experimentation, but they were not perhaps the most instinctively businesslike of people. Shortly after Roederer bought it Cutty Sark pulled out, leaving a pretty dire financial situation behind. Under Roederer’s management, however, the Almeida family, who still run it (Jean-Claude’s strategy never involved turfing out the previous owners – unless they were dead) had started to make table wine as well as Port. Jean-Claude may say now mock-ruefully that buying Ramos Pinto was “a big mistake”, but this Douro table wine, Duas Quintas, has entirely replaced Cutty Sark in the accounts.
>Working together
Frédéric’s training was totally different and gives him, says Jean-Claude, a wider perspective. More reserved than his father, he’s been at Roederer since September 1996, and before that was in charge of the vineyards department at a real estate company in Paris. One of his tasks there was to find a buyer for Champagne Deutz, which was due to be taken over by a French bank at FF1,000 (£113) per share. “It seemed like the best deal of my life,”said Jean-Claude of this, 10 years ago. “I could prevent this company from taking it over. In eight days the deal was done.” They get on well, you see, father and son, but this is probably because they work at it. Frédéric, when he was younger, didn’t want to work with his father immediately. “You have to be well psychologically prepared on both sides, you have to compromise; it’s difficult to do that when you’re too young. You have to be strong, solid, intelligent,” says Jean-Claude. “It was clever of him to decide [to retire],” says Frédéric. Jean-Claude explains: “It was becoming more and more difficult for Frédéric… If we can be considered as a good example I will be very pleased.”
When I interviewed Jean-Claude 10 years ago he said that he felt himself more and more “charged with responsibility, and it feels harder and harder to carry. There are too many people looking at me as the king of Champagne; the man who succeeds with everything he touches. It’s not unpleasant to be considered so successful… A few people never doubt themselves. I am the reverse. I doubt every decision I take. I study everything in detail. It takes a long time for me to make a decision, but once I have decided, I carry it out… The day I decide to retire I will have to turn the page. I could not bear to see someone working differently.”
Well, he’s still president, discussing strategy and options with Frédéric while the latter deals with the day-to-day running of the company. Frédéric says his approach is similar to his father’s, “even to do better if possible”. “I want to see it,” says Jean-Claude, and laughs dryly. “There’s no other way,” says Frédéric. “In a family business, either you don’t do it, or you’re totally committed. Everything concerns you, a euro is a euro. I manage it as Jean-Claude did, with the feeling that it’s my money. And it’s a long-term view.”
It is possible, however, that the more austere aspects of the Roederer approach are being eased – not least because the company can undoubtedly afford it. It is not the same almost-bankrupt company that Jean-Claude’s grandmother took over, nor the same surviving but not yet booming company that he took over. According to DrVino.com, quoting Challenges magazine, Jean-Claude and his family are the 88th richest in France, and the company is worth e375 million. (Chicken feed, of course, compared to Bernard Arnault, whose 48% stake in LVMH is worth an estimated e17.205 billion.) With the purchase of Pichon-Lalande for e180m the company will be in debt for almost the first time. The very first time was when it founded Roederer Estate in California’s Anderson Valley at much the same time as the dollar went from FF4 to FF10. But Jean-Claude’s rule then was that the loan had to pay for itself and be paid off in two years. When Jean-Claude bought de Pez and Beauséjour (now Haut-Beauséjour) in the Médoc he opted for bourgeois-level wines because he wouldn’t have been able to pay cash for a cru classé; now they’ve taken the plunge.
Continuing the good work
Will they buy anything else? “We have to pay for Pichon first”, they say. They’ve started a research programme in the vineyards, with soil mapping and analysis – the same sort of thing they did at de Pez in St-Estèphe. It’s all to do with making sure the right vines are planted on the right soils: the vineyards were mostly planted 30 to 35 years ago, and knowledge has moved on. The idea is to keep all the elegance of Pichon-Lalande but to make the wine more precise.
They’re doing just as much work, too, at Domaines Ott, in which they bought a 66% share in 2004. This was a purchase that Frédéric favoured and Jean-Claude did not – oddly, for someone with a house in Corsica, he dislikes rosé. They both recognise that the wine is expensive, and has been surpassed in quality by others. But, they say, it’s the only brand in Provence and it can and will be revived. Frédéric heads down there every two to three months with consultant Denis Dubourdieu to sort out the winemaking – the vineyards, apparently, are in good shape, though the Ugni Blanc will be weeded out, and there’ll be more Rolle and Sémillon planted.
Nearer home they’re building a big new cellar at Roederer with huge storage capacity for bottles to take account of higher production: Roederer will go from 3m bottles to a projected 4m. And production of Cristal will increase in proportion, remaining roughly 20% of production in a good year – tiny, they point out, compared to Dom Pérignon. (As an aside, the people at Dom Pérignon have an attack of terrible coyness whenever they’re asked about production figures. Well, 10 years ago, when Jean-Claude quoted Cristal’s production at 500,000 bottles, he reckoned that DP was 3 to 4m. And, he said, “They’re both too expensive for a bottle of Champagne.”) But he stresses that this is not just a question of meeting demand. “There are no marketing people in the tasting room when we decide which wines go into Cristal.”
Jean-Claude is not, however, about to push for a reduction in the price of Cristal, and he warns – half jokingly? – that he’ll be keeping an eye on the dividends now that they are paying for his semi-retirement. “I spent all my life trying to steal time for holidays and having to work like crazy before and after; now I’m enjoying myself as never before. I travel a lot. Every six weeks I go somewhere” – and mostly to scuba dive, so it’s places like the Maldives and Seychelles. Look out for him if you happen to be there – but remember not to offer him a glass of rosé.
| CV: Jean-Claude Rouzaud: • 1942, March 16: Jean-Claude Rouzaud is born • 1966: graduates from the National School of Enology in Montpellier, and then spends a year studying viticulture • 1967: joins Louis Roederer as assistant to vice president • 1972: becomes technical director • 1975: becomes director of production • 1979: becomes CEO • 1982: becomes president of the Mendocino Land Cie, Louis Roederer Holding in the US • 1987: becomes president of Maisons Marques & Domaines Ltd UK, created in 1986 • 1990: becomes president of Adriano Ramos Pinto • 1992: becomes managing director of Château Haut-Beausejour Saint-Estèphe, acquired in 1992 • 1993: becomes president of Champagne Deutz et Grands Vins • 1995: becomes managing director of Château de Pez • 2000: acquires 55% of the capital shares of Maison Jean Descaves in Bordeaux |
| CV: Frederic Rouzaud: • 1967, June 19: Frédéric Rouzaud is born • 1985-1990: studies general administration at the University of Dauphine in Paris • 1991: starts first job in real estate at Colliers Auguste Thouard Group • 1991-1993: Works for same group in vineyards transaction and expertise department • 1993-1996: moves to commercial rent and sale department • September 1996: Starts working for the family business, Louis Roederer, in charge of the French market, particularly Paris • January 2000: becomes personnel officer • January 2006: becomes general manager |
© db March 2008