Marketing Strategique

Château Guiraud:

A Premier Grand Gru wine

(1855 classification)

Author: Dr.Pierre Mora, Professor, Department of Marketing and Customer Relationships

BEM Bordeaux Management School

Table of contents

First section p.3

- I – Château Guiraud p.3

o More than 300 years of history p.3

o At the heart of the Sauternes appellation district p.4

o A specific kind of production p.4

o The ecology of a wine p.5

o Pricing and markets p.5

- II- Château Guiraud in its environment p.6

o Economic data p.6

o The very particular world of Grands Cru wines p.7

o Profile of Sauternes consumers p.8

o The system of wine futures and allocations p.8

o Positioning in supermarkets p.9

o Sweet Bordeaux p.9

Second section p.10

- Choosing modes of communication for Château Giraud p.10

Assignment p.13

Appendices p.14

- A1 : Europe organic winegrowing data ` p.14

- A2 : Images of organic winegrowers p.16

- A3 : Generation Y loves luxury p.17

First section

Château Guiraud in its environment

I-Château Guiraud

1. More than 300 years of history

La Maison Noble du Bayle, the initial name given to Château Guiraud, belonged to the Mons de Saint Poly family. On 22 February 1766, Pierre Guiraud, a Protestant merchant from Bordeaux, bought the property for 53,000 pounds, before leaving it to his son Louis when he died in 1799. Louis was the one who turned Bayle into the great vineyard that it has become, restoring its fortunes after difficult times that it experienced starting in 1793. When Louis’s son Pierre-Aman inherited Bayle in 1837 – the last time a Guiraud family member took ownership of the property – it was worth 250,000 Francs after tripling in value in less than forty years.

Over a period of 80 years covering three generations, Guiraud had been turned into a prestigious Grand Cru great wine, officially listed as a top category Premier Cru under the new imperial classification that came out in 1855. One and a half centuries later, or to be precise on 20 July 2006, the property was acquired by a consortium of four celebrities comprised of one industrialist (Robert Peugeot) and three winemakers (Olivier Bernard, Stephan Von Neipperg and Xavier Planty). The impetus for this new team had been a dinner in Paris where they shared their passion for a lifestyle of wines, gastronomy, nature and hunting, quickly agreeing that the wine should have a distinct philosophy and an ethos of quality.

2. At the heart of the Sauternes appellation district

The Sauternes-Barsac appellation district stretches 2,200 hectares across five townships: Sauternes, Barsac, Preignac, Fargues and Bommes.

3. A specific production

Average annual output for the Premier Cru Classé top wine is 100,000 bottles, although no wine of this quality is produced in bad years like 1991 or 1993. The château also makes a lower quality, “second wine” called Petit Guiraud, which comes from a mixture of grapes taken from younger vines. As for the Premier Cru “first wine”, this is cultivated on 85 hectares of Sauternes appellation vines. The only grapes that Guiraud grows are Semillon (65% of its total output, with grapes cut using the cots method) and Sauvignon (35% of the property’s total, with grapes cut using the longs bois method). The vineyard’s density is 6,660 vines per hectare (Riparia root stock 33 09, 101 14, 161 49), with each averaging 35 or 40 years in age and yielding about 12 hectolitres/hectare.

The maximum authorised yield for this particular appellation is 25 hectolitres/hectare. Grape-picking is done by hand only and involves a series of two to six operations sorting raisined grapes. A minimum temperature of 20° is required to start the harvest. Fermentation is spontaneous and takes between three weeks and two months, using new barrels that are renewed every three years. The different batches are fermented until they reach an equilibrium point that is specific to each. It is absolutely forbidden to chaptalise, cryoextract or use any other enrichment techniques. The wine is left to mature in a barrel for 18 to 24 months, depending on the vintage.

One tangible sign of the care and expertise used in making Château Guiraud’s Premier Grand Cru can be seen in its Parker or Wine Spectator ranking, with the wine often being awarded more than 90 points out of 100.

4. The ecology of a wine

Ecology is the study of interactions between living beings and their surroundings. The term comes from the Green oikos (“house”, “habitat”) and logos (“science”, “knowledge”). It is the science of one’s home, this being the generally accepted definition and one that is particularly widespread in human ecology, in the form of a triangular concept focusing on the relationship between members of a species, the activities they organise and the environment

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