Well-traveled

Lunch With a Winemaking Prince

Click here  to view today’s slide show.

Prince Robert de Luxembourg

The chateaux that dot Bordeaux’s left bank are not there for decorative purposes; nearly all of them are working wineries, and many are also full-time homes. While some properties are now owned by corporations, most are still held by families—extraordinarily affluent families. Generally speaking, Bordeaux is old money; for instance, Lafite and Mouton, two of the first growths (these were the wines designated the best in Bordeaux under the 1855 classifications, which are still in use), are properties of the Rothschilds. And, as logic would suggest, the higher a winery sits in Bordeaux’s pecking order, the more extravagant the chateau.

Pichon-Lalande was probably the most beautiful of the chateaux I visited—from the gravel courtyard to the Italianate garden terrace overlooking the vineyards and the Gironde River it oozed luxury and good taste. Ducru-Beaucaillou was also pretty spectacular. Bruno Borie, its owner, shares the chateau with his mother. Evidently, he is one of Bordeaux’s more eligible bachelors and has constructed within the chateau an apartment to make architects and girlfriends swoon. I didn’t get to see the flat, but the tasting room, a long narrow vault with a rounded ceiling, looked like something out of a Bond movie, an impression amplified by the group of comely young women milling about during my stop there. Life on Bruno’s isle looked to be quite nice.

I wanted to observe the en primeurs mania from the viewpoint of a proprietor. Prince Robert de Luxembourg, whose family owns Chateau Haut-Brion, was happy to oblige, so I got to spend a busy but pleasant afternoon at his side, watching him meet and greet groups of tasters. The winery is located in the Pessac-Leognan appellation, which is an anomaly among Bordeaux’s major wine districts in that it is close to the city. In fact, the city has grown up around Haut-Brion, surrounding the chateau with houses, apartment blocks, and a rail line. Haut-Brion is also one of the first growths (there are five in total, Latour and Margaux being the others); you might even say it is the first among firsts, having acquired an international reputation long before any other Bordeaux wine. John Locke and Samuel Pepys were among Haut-Brion’s earliest aficionados.

Despite the royal prefix, Prince Robert is actually the 35-year-old scion of a venerable American family, the Dillons. His great-grandfather, Clarence Dillon, who struck gold as head of the investment bank Dillon Read, purchased Haut-Brion in 1935; his grandfather, Douglas Dillon, served as Kennedy’s secretary of the treasury. Robert is the offspring of Douglas Dillon’s daughter Joan and the late Prince Charles of Luxembourg.

Robert does not actually live at Haut-Brion. He and his American wife, along with their three children, currently reside in London, though they have other homes in Provence and Maine. There is an unyielding formality about Robert, but when you get past the fancy name and the double-breasted pinstriped suits, you find an amiable, erudite man with a good sense of humor and interesting stories to tell. He originally worked as a screenwriter and had several films optioned, but he put aside his Hollywood ambitions in 1997 to manage the family’s wine interests, which include not just Haut-Brion but also several neighboring estates, notably Chateau La Mission Haut-Brion, whose reputation is nearly as exalted as the mother ship’s. Robert is usually in Bordeaux once or twice a month, and he travels around the world for Haut-Brion tastings and other promotional events.

My visit began with lunch. Robert was entertaining several clients—two Canadians, two Europeans—and invited me to join them. Joining in, as well, was Jean-Philippe Delmas, Haut-Brion’s genial winemaker. The Delmas family has been associated with Haut-Brion even longer than the Dillons. Georges Delmas, Jean-Philippe’s grandfather, was already the winemaker when Clarence Dillon purchased the estate; Jean-Philippe’s father, Jean-Bernard, was born at the chateau and went on to become one of the great winemakers in Bordeaux history. He recently retired and Jean-Philippe, 35, has now succeeded him.

I had lunch at Mission Haut-Brion two years ago, with Jean-Philippe and his father, a terrific meal marred only when my son, then 10 months old, vomited on the table. Lunch this time took place across the street, in the dining room at Haut-Brion, which, like the rest of the chateau, had a solemn opulence about it. The food was simple, appealing—a leek quiche, cod, cheese, fruit—the wines abundant and superb (champagne, followed by four bottles, the highlight being the 1982 Haut-Brion, which was its usual sublime self). Apart from the lunch wines, wine was not a topic of conversation; Robert, blessed with the kind of rich, commanding voice that can only be described as princely, instead steered the discussion in a direction the Canadians would especially enjoy—we talked hockey. With a packed schedule for the afternoon, he also kept the meal moving along at a brisk pace (aided in that task by a small bell on the table that he used to summon the wait staff).

After seeing the guests off, Robert and Jean-Philippe began several hours of shuttling back and forth between various tasting rooms—two at Haut-Brion, two across the street at Mission Haut-Brion. There was a retailer from Paris and another from Chicago, several Eastern European buyers, an English importer, and a smattering of other visitors. The setup was impressive; every glass was monogrammed, every place setting at the tasting tables came with a small bottle of Evian and a few slices of baguette, and the pours were extremely generous—nearly full glasses (all the more astonishing given that probably 98 percent of the wine ends up in dump buckets).

Robert told me they were expecting around 1,000 people over a 10-day period and that more than 700 bottles of wine would be emptied. I couldn’t help but think it was all a bit unnecessary. At this point, Haut-Brion can be sold on reputation alone, and rightly so; the vineyard, now swaddled by suburbia, has more than established its greatness over the last 400 years (and the 2003s were typically excellent, especially the two white wines, Haut-Brion and Laville Haut-Brion). But Robert insisted it was all in a good cause. “We’re a family business, and I think it is important for clients to be able to see us,” he said. “It is also a way for us to gauge the market.”

The conversations during the tastings had a numbing repetitiousness about them—the same questions about the vintage, about prices, about Robert Parker—but if Robert and Jean-Philippe were bored, they did a nice job of hiding it. Part of what they were selling, of course, was mystique. There is a school of thought in the wine world, promulgated mostly by Parker, that history is bunk and that all that matters is what is in the bottle. I largely agree, but Haut-Brion happens to be a delicious marriage of quality and history. In one of the tasting rooms we visited, there hung a framed photo of Clarence Dillon and Jean Delmas, taken in the 1930s. As I looked at the picture, Dillon’s great-grandson and Delmas’ grandson stood behind me, chatting amiably about Haut-Brion with several clients. It was a neat juxtaposition.

Later, as we were saying goodbye in the courtyard, I asked Robert if he liked his work. “I’d be lying if I said it was something I wanted, but I love the job. I’ve always enjoyed wine, I get to work with my family, and I get to visit a lot of interesting places.” And what about the screenwriting? “I’d like to come back to it, assuming my brain isn’t too addled by all the wine.”