Chanel's Bordeaux Range
Fashion brands, large corporations, and especially finance firms investing in wine estates rarely sits right with me. And yet Chanel’s foray into Bordeaux has always felt a little different to most. No noisy fanfare, no flashy branding slapped on the label, just the Wertheimer family getting on with the serious business of restoring three proper estates: Château Rauzan-Ségla in Margaux (acquired 1994), Château Canon in Saint-Émilion (1996), and Château Berliquet (2017). With Chanel, the point seems not novelty but refinement, the slow polishing of detail over time until quality becomes the only headline. Am I being a little naive? Perhaps. But if you cannot be romantic about wine, what can you?
At Rauzan-Ségla, that has meant long-term vineyard work and a properly modern, precision-minded cellar, moving away from blunt, one-size-fits-all winemaking towards parcel-by-parcel handling, with smaller vats and the sort of granular control Margaux positively demands. Over in Saint-Émilion, Canon has had the full treatment too: major renovations completed in 2015, a clear technical direction under Nicolas Audebert, and the added brainpower of consultant Thomas Duclos, with a growing emphasis on organic practices and improved farming. Berliquet, sitting conveniently next door, benefits from the same steady hand and shared expertise, which is rather the point of owning a little cluster on the limestone. The latter was, in my view, a tremendously shrewd buy.
