1 Introduction

FRIDAY JULY 13th 1973. The eve of the French national holiday, the weather is gloomy and it’s Friday 13th… a bad omen?

I leave Paris in the early morning, driving our brown Renault 16 that is bursting at the seams with luggage. My Portuguese father-in-law, João-Maria, who is spending a few days in France, follows me at the wheel of our green English Austin Cooper. We are off to the Médoc to join my wife Thereza and our three children – Anne-Christine, known as Kinou, born in 1969, Marina who was born on Christmas Eve 1970 and the youngest, Catherine, born in Boulogne, a one-month-old baby comfy in her bassinet – who have made the trip by train ahead of us.

It will be good for our family to be together again in the Médoc. We are waiting to find a permanent home; until then, we move into the apartment my parents built for their friends in the old Duhart-Milon barrel cellars on the quays of Pauillac. It’s a beautiful modern house built around 15 years earlier on the site of the old ‘château’; a building of little character that was threatening to fall into ruin.

I have just turned 38 years old. We have chosen this weekend of July 14th to reverse the journey I took from Pauillac to Paris 20 years earlier. I thought at the time that I would never return. My university career in Paris finished in the United States in 1960 with a degree in petroleum geology, followed by a dozen years as an engineer in a new discipline, for which the word informatique (computer science) was invented and entered the dictionary of the French Academy in 1966. I know that a new chapter in my family and professional life is opening today, and, despite some nerves, I am looking forward to it.

Once back in Pauillac, the second half of July is marked by incessant rain. This distinctly unfriendly welcome sums up the oceanic climate of the Gironde and puts my sun-loving wife Thereza immediately on edge, but the summer of 1973 passes quickly, fortunately.

I am now a partner in the insurance agency André and Jean-Michel Cazes in Pauillac; we are the local representatives of the La Providence insurance company. I work hard at my new role, while familiarizing myself with the daily life of Château Lynch-Bages, our family property, where Roger Mau is in charge – he is an experienced cellarmaster who also acts as head of the vineyard.

The wine market, in freefall during decades of slump, has begun to recover. Bordeaux has come a long way.

For a long time ‘all the Médoc was for sale’, as my father used to say. There was a slight improvement after the frost of February 1956, which destroyed large parts of the vineyard, especially on the Right Bank. The coldest parts, invariably the areas that always struggled to ripen, had been most affected, which meant a decrease in production but an overall improvement in quality. The 1956 catastrophe also gave a small boost to wine prices, the effects of which were gradually felt in the 1960s, despite the disastrous quality of the 1963, 1965 and 1968 vintages.

American demand is growing, led by New York importers Austin Nichols and Dreyfus Ashby. The Bordeaux trade is in full swing. In the vineyards, people are starting to believe again. Henri Martin, president of the Conseil Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bordeaux (CIVB), mayor of Saint-Julien and Grand Master of the Commanderie du Bontemps, gives his opinion. He proclaims loud and clear: ‘The years of misery in Bordeaux are over!’

It all seems to underline my father’s words that the last three years had been getting better and better – first slowly with the 1969 and 1970 harvests, then more markedly with the 1971 and especially the 1972, for which the En Primeur release prices in the spring of 1973 reached unprecedented levels.

With all of this good news, we begin plans to buy a house… but soon give up the idea when we see the wheel of fortune turn… in the wrong direction. Barely two months after our arrival, the oil crisis of September 1973 hits. The price of a barrel of crude oil rises dramatically in a few days from US$3 to US$30, causing a sudden rise in interest rates and widespread credit restrictions which lead to a series of bankruptcies in the Bordeaux trade and the great wine crisis of 1974–80.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves... Let’s start at the beginning.