2011 Chêne Bleu Round-up

2011 CHENE BLEU ROUND-UP— Riding the bucking bronco, and staying on! –ish! (** Legal neutice, some dates and names have been changed to protect the inneucent)The year felt like a turning point year on many fronts. Our chance to bang on pots and pans and toot the proverbial horn.It’s hard to describe the scale of the challenges facing a spritely but small start-up winery trying to make its way through the Jungle of Giant Jeopardies to the Promised Land where Pundit Points propagate and Points of Sale proliferate.  The year was full of sound & fury, travels & tribulations, searing set-backs, deadlines of doom.  But who wants to read about all the tough stuff on a blog?  So……WELCOME TO THE BRAGZONE:  Awesome Awards: 2011 started off with a “Bang”:  our Heloïse and Rosé both won gold medals at the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles in January…… and ended with a “Ch-Ching”, as we won a medal on every single one of the 5 wines that we entered into the Hong Kong International Wine and Spirit competition in November.  Selected as journo’s top picks (coup de coeur) from the fair.Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we bagged more awards at The International Wine Challenge and the Decanter World Wine Awards in London in May, too.  Yee-ha!Prestigious Press: a hefty harvest, some highlights here:In the Spring, La Verrière was the covergirl of Travel & Leisure as a Bruce Schoenfeld top pick of Provence.In the Summer, Rory Ross, lifestyle writer for Tatler et al, waxed poetic about his Extreme Wine Experience.In the Fall, John Stimpfig exposed Chene Bleu to the world in his four-page expose’ in the FT How To Spend It. Commented Decanter's Steven Spurrier 'The wines are exceptional in every sense of the word…I admire the intelligent, haute-couture approach'.In the Winter, James Molesworth at Wine Spectator wrote that Chene Bleu is ‘one of the most exciting new projects to come along in the Southern Rhône since I’ve been covering the region’ and other nice stuff about the wines.Our eminent Oenologists excel BOTH our senior oenologist-consultants, Philippe Cambie and Zelma Long, were shortlisted among only five for Winemaker of the Year in Wine Enthusiast Magazine.  It’s a very short short-list and we are very proud of them.  Considering how differently we came about working with them (long story), it was a happy coincidence.Imperial Importers There are only three things that matter on the business side of wine: Distribution, Distribution and Distribution.  Big steps in the right direction: Impressive Importers in England (Justerini & Brooks), New England and New York (Winebow), lovely little ones in Macau (Perfect Vintage) and Australia (Ventoux wines).  We can now ship almost anywhere in the US.  Great additions to the growing family, will work alongside Margerum wines (US), L’Art du Vin (Scotland), Bluetree (HK), KookSungDang (KO).Lots of lovely listingOur rose’ is now for sale at Sherry Lehmann in New York, the reds are at Peter Morrell and in restaurants such as  Ai Fiori in the Setai,  RN74 and the Wine Cask.  We’re cheerfully chuffed that Raj Parr, the Indian celebrity sommelier in America, took the wine for some restaurants in the Michael Mina group. And ferociously flattered to be admitted to the Wall of the Palm Tribeca’s Winemaker Wall of Fame. Here’s a sample serving of discriminating wine lists sporting Chene Bleu: In the UK the wine is newly on the list at Nobu, The Boundary and Le Boudin Blanc which join Sketch, Angelus, Thomas Cubitt and others. In Hong Kong new listings include the Ritz, Cepage, in addition to Pierre Gagnaire’s restaurant and Amber at the Mandarin Oriental.  We’ve just updated all stockists on our website http://www.chenebleu.com/chene-bleu-stockists.pdfExploring the Earth: Going where no Blue Oak has gone before…This year I logged some serious miles to proselytize about our project- I worried that my lifestyle was slipping back to the abyss of my decade in investment banking! But it wasn’t all conference rooms and airports like the bad old days. I got to drive with Doug Margerum from San Fran to San Diego— stopping to call on wonderful wine shops and restaurants… our own sequel to Sideways.   Doug, of WineCask and Magerum Wines fame, sells our wine in and around Santa Barbara, and is definitely Big-Man-on-Campus in California, a regular centrefold in Wine Spectator, so we got red carpet treatment everywhere and I was lovin’ it.  We made our way to Hospice du Rhone in Paso Robles—I admit I was an HdR virgin and really enjoyed my First Time.  Amazingly, it’s chaired by a fellow Vassar grad, John Alban ’83, now a shining star of the Rhone Rangers.I always love exploring new parallel universes and microcosms, and my first recognizance tours to Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei and Taichung, in the good company of the young dynamic Vincent Norguet (One to Watch), were a stunning experience (more in another blog) both professionally and culturally. Macau was marvellous, as the grateful guest of Gordon Yuen!Flew the Grenache flag in various venues: “Grenache the Eco Superstar” in Marbella with Kofi Annan at the Climate Change and Wine conference, and WineFuture in Hong Kong; “Grenache the Friendly Grape” at Decouvertes du Rhône & Vinexpo in France; “Grenache the Great Connector”at International Grenache Day around the world.Glorious Giving: Reaching for the Stars and for our PocketsChene Bleu did some travelling without me as we sponsored our dear friend and client on her trek to the top of Kilimanjaro, which she climbed in February to denounce Human Trafficking. She flew the Chene Bleu flag (well, T-shirt actually) at the top – prophetic symbolism at its cheesiest. Wine-4-Freedom!  Also, Columbia Business School hosted an amusing Chêne Bleu lunch at its Pan European Conference in the Fall— got 300 serious business people on their best behaviour to pull out their reading glasses and look for bunny rabbits hidden in our label.  Bet you they didn’t learn how to do THAT in B-School : )  Then we sponsored the Foreign Sisters association of World Women against Cancer, The Pomegranate Fund and the Princes Trust in Scotland.OK, this is getting long and wordy (sadly, my signature style in case you hadn’t noticed), so time to wrap up (yes, there’s MORE!)“But, enough about Us, let’s talk about you.  So what do you think about Us?” (for those of you who were never single girls in Manhattan as I once was, this phrase is recycled from a cliché about how self-involved guys in New York would talk to us).