en Asie, une crise peut en cacher une autre
“From the top of these old stones, more than six hundred years of history you despise!” We don’t know if Napoleon Bonaparte stopped in Saint-Emilion one day, but the Couvent des Jacobins is not new. It is one of only two Grands Crus Classés present in the center of the medieval village. “It has been a family property since 1902″, says Xavier Jean, great-great-grandson of the designer. “MBut Dominican monks arrived here long before, in the 1380s.” The estate, today, is nine hectares of vines and 35,000 bottles produced per year.
One foot in Singapore
a dozen years, a part is also sold in Southeast Asia, where Xavier Jean represents the family brand. It is especially in Singapore, where 10 to 15% of in-house production is spent, that the effects of Covid-19 have been most noticeable:
“Pendant two to three months, there was very strict confinement”, remembers the French. “In 2020, volumes fell by around 20%. But since last year, the recovery has been quite strong across the region, except in China and Hong Kong because of their strict zero Covid policies.”
In Singapore, 70% of the customers of the Couvent des Jacobins are professionals, restaurants or hotels, and the rest wine merchants and private customers. “It’s a market that has become really structured and sophisticated over the past fifteen years”, notes Xavier Jean. “Today there are about 200 wine importers here. It is a profession which, in fact, has been a driving force in developing the entire gastronomy sector with a lot of restaurants thanks to a wealthier middle class than elsewhere in Asia.
Bring your brand to life
A student at the Tivoli private high school in Bordeaux, then a management student in Montreal, Xavier Jean, a well-born young man, began his career in London in financial services before taking off for Asia. Based in Singapore, he did not start working for the family estate until 2011. Today, it is not so much the pandemic as the effects of the war which occurred at the end of February in Ukraine via Moscow that the Frenchman fears:
“The direct impact is actually quite limited because we are not very present in Russia, with less than 5% of our volumes consumed. But this kind of geopolitical crisis always affects the confidence of consumers, traders and currencies. This will ultimately impact all stakeholders in the sector.”
The lesson that Xavier Jean draws in any case from his two successive crises is, he says, the need to bring his brand to life and embody it: “We are not multinationals, but family domains. In Asia, customers appreciate, almost even more than the labels, when the owner or the general manager of the domain comes on site to tell them his story. They like to talk to people who do the harvesting, the vinification and those who decide on the blends. It’s a strength.”
And when this”narration” hit the mark, wealthy buyers sometimes turn into tourists and come as far as Saint-Emilion to visit the estate and spend a night or two there in a gîte in the heart of the vineyards, with tasting and an influx of foreign currency is becoming more and more important for castles.
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