Wine hotels: staying the night?

Building a hotel to accommodate guests visiting one’s winery seems like a logical extension of the business and the brand. But how does the synergy between winemaking and hospitality work in practice? Margaret Rand sleeps on it.

IMAGINE THIS. You’ve got the vineyard, you’ve got the brand, you’ve got people who know your name across the world. But when people come to see you, where do they stay? There’s no decent hotel for miles, and the local three-star does not give your visitors quite the feeling of all enveloping luxury that you would like.

But you’ve got some redundant buildings.

Transform them into a hotel and your visitors will be under your eye day and night, absorbing your brand values with their morning orange juice. How could it possibly go wrong? Hotels started by wine companies always seem to be about brand extensions in one way or another (though Adrian Bridge disagrees: see below).

Even at Quinta da Romaneira, where the hotel (called Romaneira, Quinta dos Sonhos) and the wine estate got going at much the same time and are now run separately, hotel guests often do a winery tour – there’s a full-time, trilingual guide, and the winery can sell you a six-bottle pack of wine that you can check in at the airport.

GOING GLOBAL

The Hotel Marqués de Riscal came about because Riscal wanted to do a marketing campaign worldwide. “How could we do that?” says Riscal president Alejandro Aznar. “Through architecture. We make good wine, but a lot of people make good wine. Image is more and more important.”

Internally it was called the 2000 Project, and was half winery facilities and half the hotel: the investment was €80million (£66.85m) in all.

“The cost of a building amortises in Spain in 50 years,” says Aznar. ”It’s like a marketing budget for Riscal; that’s what I tell our people. Imagine spending it on marketing.” Riscal was recently named one of the 10 most recognised wine brands in the world: it would be fair to describe them as “satisfied”.

Riscal decided, after much discussion, to hand over the management to the Starwood group, which has about 1,000 hotels, and is now making an agreement with Riscal to introduce its wines around the world.

Château Cordeillan-Bages in Pauillac, the brainchild of Jean-Michel Cazes of Lynch-Bages, is run by Relais & Châteaux, as is Romaneira, Quinta dos Sonhos. But The Yeatman in Oporto is run by the Fladgate Partnership, aka Taylor’s, Fonseca and Croft. “The secret to a good hotel is detail,” says Adrian Bridge.

”You need the involvement of the owner, who has more at stake; the owner’s ability to see detail is fundamental. At the operational end of wine, seeing detail is also fundamental.”

But, he points out, hotels and wine are very differents sorts of business.

“With a hotel all the capital is upfront, and thereafter the only cost is people. With wine, you have raw materials coming in every year. In a sense there’s no limit to how much Port Taylor’s can make. But the hotel has 82 rooms, and there are 365 nights in the year.”

The Yeatman is of course the second hotel that the group has owned, the first being The Vintage House in Pinhão. “Vintage House quickly became known as the Taylor’s hotel, and people would say, ‘the food’s not up to scratch, it’s good, but we expect more from Taylor’s. The brand transfer wasn’t good for either.

The Yeatman is not a brand extension: it has to be something in its own right… I’m very keen that consumers don’t see it as a Taylor’s hotel or a Croft hotel.” It’s designed, Bridge says, “to show off our town, our region, our wine… it’s a bigger project than hotels with a [wine] brand. It’s a reference for quality in Portugal and worldwide. If you tie it to a wine brand, you limit its personality.

The Yeatman is bigger than any single Port brand.” Partly it’s a question of physical size. “If you build a 12-bed hotel,” says Bridge, “it’s absolutely rational to tie it to a single brand, and it’s used by people who know that brand.

You can build a business with that.

Our level is bigger than boutique, which stops at 50 beds, and smaller than corporate, which is 120-plus. We’re in the middle of the city; people are coming to explore Port, and we are becoming the authentic teller of the story.”

A BEAUTIFUL PARTNERSHIP

Of the 82 rooms at The Yeatman, 67 are sponsored by a partner.

This “doesn’t cost an outrageously large amount of money”, says Bridge; they get to put some branded knick-knackery into the room and the hotel commits to promote their wines and puts on a wine dinner once a year. “Clearly there are companies that have not accepted that offer, and we do want their wines.

Given that we make an effort to get behind our partners, companies that are not partners may be on the [wine] list, but they’re not given the same level of promotion.”

Given the circumstances that led to the hotel at Quinta da Romaneira being separated in ownership terms from the winery (it’s fairly well known in the trade that the hotel initially lost a lot of money) is Bridge glad he built in Oporto rather than in the Douro? “The Douro season is a lot shorter than in the city.

We decided after the 2008 crisis to go ahead, but we understood that Portugal would have more difficulties than other countries. If we’d planned to build in the Douro we probably wouldn’t have gone ahead.”

Romaneira, however, opened its hotel in September 2008. The hotel is now less expensive than it was and, says Christian Seely, who runs the winery and is one of the group of shareholders behind the original project, “We realised that the best way to manage the vineyard and the hotel was to manage them separately. It was the best recipe for harmony.”

The hotel had a good year last year, he says, and it’s helped the Romaneira wine brand quite a lot: a wine operation and a hotel have “different mentalities, but there’s a synergy”.

HOUSE BOUND

Another model is the hotel that isn’t a hotel: Veuve Clicquot’s Hôtel du Marc is a hotel only in the sense of a grand town house. Veuve Clicquot’s guests stay there and dine to Veuve Clicquot standards, and the stuffed giraffe in one of the salons wears VC goggles.

You can’t, at the moment, pay to stay there. But, says Stephane Gerschel, they haven’t ruled out the possibility.

“We’re equipped, we have the standards, but there’s a fear that the relationship might change. We have eight staff, including two chefs, two maids and two butlers. That might not be enough for a commercial hotel. And how much would we charge?

There are five rooms only.

We want to be fully booked every night, but how do you have commercial guests and friends in the same place?”Brand-building can be even more thorough, of course, when you have no necessity to stock other people’s wines and your hotel is all about the lifestyle associated with your brand.

So different – so very different – from the recent experience of a colleague of mine who invited to base himself for a few days in a property’s guest wing while finishing a book, arrived after hours to find the gates locked, the place deserted, and in order to find the key had no option but to climb over the wall.

At which point the alarm went off… db

Featured hotels

Quinta da Romaneira, Oporto, Portugal, www.quintadaromaneira.pt

Hotel Marqués de Riscal, Elciego, Spain, www.hotel-marquesderiscal.com

Château Cordeillan-Bages, Pauillac, France, www.cordeillanbages.com

The Yeatman, Porto, Portugal,www.the-yeatman-hotel.com

CS Vintage House Hotel, Pinhåo, Portugal, www.csvintagehouse.com

Hôtel du Marc, Reims, France, www.veuve-clicquot.com