Product details
- ISBN 9781913141486
- Weight: 1002g
- Dimensions: 170 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 12 Apr 2023
- Publisher: ACADEMIE DU VIN LIBRARY LIMITED
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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"...a quite remarkable book... For students of this period and for future historians, this will be essential reading." — World of Fine Wine
"This wide-ranging memoir of one of Bordeaux's grandest fromages, who died in June aged 88, is full of history and anecdote." — Telegraph
Owner of Château Lynch-Bages, Grand Cru Classé of Pauillac, Jean-Michel Cazes is an international figure in wine. He has contributed to bringing the Bordeaux vineyard into the modern day and bears witness to the upheavals in the wine world over the past 50 years.
After a golden age crowned by the 1855 classification which made Bordeaux crus the most famous wines in the world, the Bordeaux vineyards took time to integrate the changes of the 20th and 21st centuries. Jean-Michel Cazes witnessed the crisis of the 1970s which saw the aura of Bordeaux tarnish and the price of its wines collapse. He was a major player in their revival and their tireless ambassador. The family history and personal journey of this enthusiastic entrepreneur, winegrower at heart, make his book a real saga. His experience and his wise reflections are all keys to deciphering the complex heritage and functioning of the grands crus of Bordeaux. This book, translated by leading Bordeaux expert, Jane Anson, is his story, not just of his own journey, but of the evolution of wine-making over the 20th century and into the 21st, where his son now runs one of the most progressive chateaux in the world, in a new facility designed by Pei Partnership.
In 1973, then an engineer at IBM, Jean-Michel Cazes joined the Médoc where his father, insurer and mayor of Pauillac, entrusted him with the exploitation of the vines of Chateau Lynch-Bages, the property of the family since 1939. He undertook the modernisation of Lynch-Bages and Ormes de Pez. From 1988, he acquired new vineyards: Villa Bel-Air in the Graves, then the Domaine de l'Ostal in La Livinière in the Languedoc, and in 2005, the Domaine des Sénéchaux in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and a few years later, the Château Haut-Batailley in Pauillac. He has also created new wines, in Portugal (Quinta do Meco in the Douro Valley) and in Australia (Tapanappa). From 1986, he took part in the construction of Axa-Millésimes (Pichon-Longueville and Cantenac-Brown in Médoc, Quinta do Noval in Portugal, Disznokö in Hungary, etc.), which he managed for 14 years.
