Man from L’Occitane: Gérard Bertrand

by Andrew Chalk

Gérard Bertrand sallies forth to the room from a podium with a vitality that belies his 60 years. He is presenting his portfolio of wines from the Languedoc (more recently named L'Occitane) region of southwest France. The Dallas audience of wine trade people is overwhelmed by the range. While the house is a familiar name, Gérard is moving as fast as ever adding wines. 

I don’t want to make too conclusive a statement about the strategy and how the new wines are determined because distributed to us all is a book Multidimensional Wine, authored by Gerard which is at once his philosophical statement about wine. His historical record from inheritor of a modest acreage and property, Domaine de Villemajou, in 1987 at age 22, to the proprietor of 16 Domaines in the present era. His tribute to the people to whom he is most grateful for his success. His musing on the significance of wine.

It is a tight 160 pages. On the way we discover that here is a top-tier rugby player who played  for RC Narbonne for nine years and Stade Français for two, retiring only because his body told him to. He credits the game for a lot of his success in the wine business. Not just the values required for success, but for contacts and the ‘street cred.’ it conferred on him in his market visits. 

FAMILY

His father was a major influence as well, to the point that Bertrand “had many conversations with him in my head” after his passing. Perhaps it was from his father that a young Gérard Bertrand learned to formulate a long-term plan, internalize it, and spend three decades executing it unbeknownst to the wider world that it even existed. Central to this was a deep but empirical belief in the quality potential of Languedoc wine. It was founded in a terroir model of wine quality. He writes “The common denominator in my purchasing choices is terroir, the only constant in a winegrowing estate. One can choose a new team, plant new grape varieties, and update the cellar, but it's impossible to change the soil and the subsoil.” 

GROWTH AND RECOGNITION

Over 20 years he added to a necklace of properties, each vividly described in terms of its unique terroir and how that could be exploited. Either these were purchased in fine shape or he is too kind to describe deficiencies that had to be fixed. Indeed, it is hard to find any person or entity described negatively throughout the book. 

By 2016-2017 several of his estates such as Cigalus, Clos du Temple, and Château L’Hospitalet were winning global recognition and the muffled exhortations of the potential of Languedoc wine needed to be retrained no longer.   

TRIBUTES

His tributes include many high profile wine industry personalities (Mel Dick, then Senior VP at Southern Wine and Spirits) was instrumental in his US success), chefs (Alain Ducasse and Guy Savoy), showbiz (working with Jon Bon Jovi on Hampton Water), and other winemakers. In the latter category, most interesting to me was Jean-Claude Berrouet as I am an admirer of his winemaking as well. I have never met him but was impressed with an Argentine malbec he made. From that I discovered that he was a winemaker at Château Petrus. He and Bertrand.hit it off immediately on account of Bertrand’s rugby career and Berrouet became an annual visit to Libourne for Bertrand to have Berrouet taste and comment on his wines.  

Much of the description of tasting sessions to create a given vintage’s cuvée is impressively detailed (especially given how long ago it was). In one tasting, a difference in the ratio of one grape (mourvèdre) out of four by 0.1% changed the calculus of all the tasters in favor of that blend. 

ENTER THE BRANDS

Many trips outside France to European states, Japan, and the United States infused his well knowledge of marketing. In France he, rugby star, had been the brand. The word made sense to him when he was abroad except that now he would have to create the brand. A scan of the current wines shows what a good student he was.

Another thing that comes through in his trials and tribulations building his empire is his own sense of ineffectuality to the greater forces of nature one faces in winemaking. Despite the touch of flamboyance at the event that I described above, he is actually a very humble man. He is willing to step back from describing the challenges making the tête de cuvée to discuss the agony of making the good: “Sometimes it is more difficult to make good wine than great wine, as consistency and typicity, especially for branded wines produced in large volumes, are never easy to guarantee.”   

It has been an impressive, multidimensional, career - thus far. I am sure that we have not seen the last of Gérard Bertrand.