Accidental Burgundy winemaker mines Asia, US business experience to innovate on tradition
Brice de La Morandière was working in China when he got the call to take on the family’s biodynamic winery. He soon began making changes
It is not quite as dramatic as a plot line in the TV drama Succession, but Brice de La Morandière came to be the head of the family winery Domaine Leflaive thanks to a rather sudden change of circumstances.
It was 2015 and Anne-Claude Leflaive, then head of the family-owned winery, died of cancer aged just 59. She was widely regarded as a trailblazer of biodynamic viniculture – an organic approach that aims to achieve harmony between the soil and plants – and her untimely death left the wine industry in shock.
A family meeting was called to decide the next step for the winery.
“I knew little about wine, except that I’ve been drinking the family wine since I was probably 10,” he recalls wryly. “I did put my name in the hat, but it came as a surprise, so I was unprepared. But I think all of the family was unprepared.”
What he did have was transferable skills in business – de La Morandière had been living and working in Hong Kong and Shanghai at the time of his aunt’s death as the chief executive of Hyva, a multinational company in the business of transport solutions.
