“Recently, I met <\/p>\n
Mr. Masafumi Suzuki meets the best n\u00e9gociant of classified ch\u00e2teaux <\/strong><\/p>\n A 50-fold increase in turnover<\/strong><\/p>\n Mr Cast\u00e9ja, born in 1950, joined the family business at the age of 26.\u00a0 A graduate of the HEC business school, he spent the first two years of his career with Coopers & Lybrand (now Pricewaterhouse Coopers) before his father asked him to return to Bordeaux. Joanne was created in 1862 by Paul Joanne, an ancestor of the family, seven years after the first Universal Exhibition organised under Napoleon III’s Second Empire in 1855. The M\u00e9doc and Graves ch\u00e2teaux (including Ch\u00e2teau Haut Brion) were classified at this exhibition. At that time, there were 95 employees at Joanne. At the end of the 1970s, Joanne was blending its own wines and marketing them to French restaurants under its own name or under the name of its clients. In 1989, this activity represented ten million bottles per year, but Mr Cast\u00e9ja was not overjoyed by this figure. However, Mr Cast\u00e9ja was not overjoyed by this figure: “I wondered where the future of our company lay. Should we continue to market wines of unknown repute bottled in our cellar? Should we concentrate our efforts on creating a powerful brand, like Mouton Cadet? Or should we focus on our business as a n\u00e9gociant of great Bordeaux wines?<\/p>\n His conclusion was to specialise in selling fine wines. Once the decision was made, he immediately stopped bottling his own and his clients’ wines.\u00a0 “It was difficult to explain to our customers or our sales team that we were going to reduce our production from 50,000 bottles sold in the first year to 30,000 next year and 10,000 the year after. A difficult argument to hear. So in 1990 he sold two production sites of 10 million bottles a year.<\/p>\n At the time, the turnover generated by the fine wine trade represented 50% of the total turnover, the other half coming from the bottling activity. This meant that half of the turnover was lost. Despite this, the company did not lay off anyone. As I listened to Mr. Cast\u00e9ja’s story, I thought of the Japanese army’s completely failed strategy during the Second World War. It strengthened its army too optimistically by making a mistake in its analysis of the war situation. This wrong view caused them to lose battles like Guadalcanal.<\/p>\n Mr Cast\u00e9ja’s strategy was completely the opposite. Mr. Cast\u00e9ja knew exactly how to read the economic situation of the time and succeeded in riding the wave of the world market’s infatuation with the fine wine market in the 1990s. With a lot of audacity and courage, he gave his company all the means to put itself in order of battle. 95% of the turnover of the Joanne company today concerns the wines of the grands crus class\u00e9s. the company exports to 63 countries. Its customer portfolio is around 1000 customers; its stock is around 5 million bottles of wine available for delivery. Joanne has become the largest wine merchant in Bordeaux. \u00a0So, what are the challenges of today? He wants to continue his development in the field of fine wines and “become the ‘Gagosian’ of the wine world” he says with a gentle smile. The Gagosian Gallery is one of the most prestigious contemporary art galleries in the world. Among the artists exhibited are Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Damien Hirst. “Artists don’t sell their work. It’s the dealers who do that. My wish is to offer the best or rarest wines to distributors all over the world, just as an art dealer would with works of art.<\/p>\n The blind tasting evening<\/strong><\/p>\n After our interview, Mr Cast\u00e9ja organised a dinner at his home in Bordeaux where we had the chance to do a blind tasting. Mr Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Engerer, the director of Ch\u00e2teau Latour, joined us there. He also went to the HEC school and is a well-known businessman. Fran\u00e7ois Pinault, the owner of the ch\u00e2teau, appointed him to this position when he bought the ch\u00e2teau. He immediately made a name for himself in Bordeaux with his “rational” business style. He has a reputation for having a rigorous temperament. That evening, he played the most important role of the evening by enthusiastically participating in the search for the wines being tasted and their vintage.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The last wine served blind was the big surprise of the evening.\u00a0 It was Chateau Leoville Barton from 1949. The year 1949 is my birth year and also the year of Mr. Hirose Yasuhisa, president of the company Enotica. \u00a0Although this elegant wine is one of my favourites, I could not guess its vintage. I first thought of 1959 or 1964 because I felt the freshness and youth of this wine. Mr Cast\u00e9ja then revealed to us which wine it was. With Mr. Hirose, we looked at each other as if we were looking in the mirror. Mr. Cast\u00e9ja and Mr. Engerez, looking at us, said at the same time: “The wine is younger than they are! \u00a0This episode made everyone laugh. The good wine of Bordeaux remains “a young man forever”.<\/p>\n Source : GQ Japan June 2020 “Recently, I met<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2346"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2379,"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346\/revisions\/2379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joanne.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nCr\u00e9dit Photo : Cond\u00e9 Nast Japan \/ GQ JAPAN \/ Osamu Yajima<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"