How does Mouton Rothschild stay at the top?

Philippe Sereys de Rothschild is unnervingly like his late mother, Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, of Bordeaux first growth Ch Mouton Rothschild. He has the same breathless delivery of clipped English and easy charm. “God, you’re early,” was how he greeted me in the lobby of The Connaught hotel in London, where we were due to meet for an interview, as he breezed in after lunch.

It’s true that, unusually, I was 15 minutes early and that, just like his mother, he was predictably late for our assignation — although only nine minutes compared with his mother’s standard half hour. But then, like Sereys de Rothschild’s late father, Jacques Sereys, she was an actor, and a baroness to boot, so was routinely excused.

Philippine de Rothschild died in 2014, leaving the family’s three Pauillac Châteaux — Mouton Rothschild, Clerc Milon and d’Armailhac — to Philippe and his siblings, Camille and Julien. Philippe, the elder son, whose professional life post-Business School had been largely in finance, took a few years to decide whether to follow her as head of the family wine business. That business — Baron Philippe de Rothschild SA — is the leading exporter of Bordeaux AOC wines in the form of the famous Mouton Cadet. “It took me three or four years to decide what I really wanted to do,” he told me. “I realised very quickly that if I wanted to do wine properly I had to do it 100 per cent. I never felt it as an obligation but I love wine.”

So in 2018 he became chairman and chief executive of the wine company that bears the name of his grandfather, who, after taking over the property as a young man, famously restored the fortunes of Ch Mouton Rothschild to such an extent that in 1973 he managed to get it promoted from second to first growth, the only such change ever to the famous 1855 classification.

He told me that he now spends three or four days a week in Pauillac. He hasn’t taken over the east-facing upper room, where his grandfather, in bed, famously received his many contacts in wine and the arts, instead choosing for himself a bedroom looking west over the vines. “It’s an absolute delight waking up to that view, a life-changer.”

Many, many years ago I stayed at Mouton (when pugnacious theatre director Joan Littlewood was also in residence) and we reminisced about its special qualities. “Mouton is full of spirits. Every object is there for a purpose which gives the place a soul.”

He readily admits he’s no wine technician, but sees his job as ensuring Mouton continues to earn its first growth status. “People don’t realise how staying at the top is an everyday challenge. You can’t take your eye off the ball. You need permanent attention to detail. If your wines are served two or three degrees too warm, they don’t taste well, for instance. And you need to do everything better every year. It takes a lot of energy but it’s necessary because the wine business is hugely competitive.

“Not only is it more and more competitive, but we’re more exposed to the media, which is a good and bad thing now that more and more people want to make the best wines.” He’s referring to wine critics’ commercially important scores here, and the en primeur circus that takes place every spring when wine critics and merchants descend on Bordeaux to taste the most recent vintage from cask when it’s only a few months old. “It’s a real luxury. We should feel lucky and thankful that then, for two weeks, most of wine media concentrate on Bordeaux. It doesn’t happen anywhere else.” (My mention of the Hospices de Beaune auction in Burgundy every November fell on deaf ears.)

Well versed in the increasing criticism of the en primeur system of selling bordeaux as futures, and the extent to which lesser vineyards are being grubbed up at pace because there is no market for their produce, I ventured to him that Bordeaux is in a bit of a pickle. Would he agree? There was an immediate and fervent “yes”. In fact, he said, that was “perhaps a bit of an understatement. Yes, it’s going through a hard time but it won’t stop us from making great wine. The product and the market are two different things. The market is difficult in many ways you can explain. The Chinese have slowed down. There are questions on the US market. Interest rates are higher. And post-Covid there are excess stocks.”

So what’s the solution, I asked. “To be more and more present on the markets,” he said firmly, “to talk about our wines.”

We were sitting overlooked by magnums of mature vintages of Mouton and bottles of the famous 1982 vintage set aside for that night’s Mouton dinner at The Connaught. He’d just come back from events in Dubai and the previous evening had hosted a tasting at the smart Mayfair wine store Hedonism. He’s a fan of the distribution job done by the Bordeaux négociants, “and then my job is to seduce the consumers”. All is by no means lost according to him. “In Dubai lots of people drink a lot of wine. The pessimists should go to Aspen, Singapore, Miami, St Barts . . . ”

Given interest rates and a stagnant market, he must be pleased at the moment that Mouton, unlike many Bordeaux châteaux, doesn’t own one of Bordeaux’s many négociants, currently so expensively stocked. But what about bordeaux wine very much at the other end of the scale? Surely, the price they pay for ingredients for their best-selling Mouton Cadet blend and their other Bordeaux branded wines has plummeted? He denied this, evincing long-term contracts with 160 growers, and seemed surprised that I suggested, correctly, that most of them are in the Entre-Deux-Mers where most AOC Bordeaux is grown.

Outside of bordeaux, the company has an array of branded wines from the Languedoc and Chile as well as their fine-wine joint ventures Opus One in California and Almaviva in Chile. Sereys de Rothschild reports that he makes sure he tastes each new release “as a consumer” and then discusses them with the relevant winemaker.

Unlike his grandfather, who had a running battle with his relatives at first growth Ch Lafite Rothschild across the vines, this Philippe gets on with the other Rothschilds, particularly with his cousin Saskia de Rothschild, who has been instituting all sorts of environmental improvements at Lafite. I was about to lecture him about the fact that Mouton’s bottles have been the heaviest of the first growths’ when he volunteered that they were reducing them from 900g to closer to 500g. Result!

He’s also proud of having instituted for Mouton Cadet a “creative lab” whereby his three children and those of his sister Camille are encouraged to get together round a table in Paris with marketing and technical people to suggest ideas and react to new products, labels and so on. “I’m an old thing and I can’t understand what the young think,” he said. “The best people to advise are clearly the children. It’s fun for them, and they do it gracefully and very seriously. The team listens to them, and it puts them in touch with the business. It’s a win-win. But of course there is no obligation for any of them to go into wine. Just as my mother made very clear there wasn’t for me.”

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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