By Sourish Bhattacharyya
WHEN Alexandra Petit-Mentzelopoulos pairs kebabs with the wines of Chateau Margaux at The Taj Mahal Hotel on Saturday, April 19, she will, perhaps
unknowingly, re-establish the old sub-continental connections of her entrepreneurial
grandfather, who was responsible for turning around the fortunes of the
Bordeaux First Growth.
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| Owner Corrine Mentzelopoulos and daughter, Alexandra, who's in India, flank Chateau Margaux's Managing Director, Paul Pontallier, at the headquarters of the prestigious Bordeaux First Growth wine house. On Saturday, April 19, Alexandra will pair the wine with kebabs at a lunch at The Taj Mahal Hotel, co-hosted by Delhi's best-known wine connoisseur, Dhruv Sawhney, CMD, Triveni Engineering, and the hotel's General Manager, Satyajeet Krishnan. Image: Courtesy of www.anthonyrosewine.com |
Andre Mentzelopoulos, the son of a Greek peasant, moved to Burma towards the end of the 1930s,
in the footsteps of his sister who had married a British Colonel of the Royal Indian
Army, with the dream to make a fortune. For the rest of this most interesting story,
let me paraphrase an account of Andre's life that I have read in the brilliantly informative website, A Good Nose
(www.agoodnose.com).
The Japanese invasion of Burma in
1941 botched Andre's plans, so he set out for India through China to pick up the
threads of his life. After Partition, fired by the dream of becoming an
independent businessman, Andre, by now a fluent speaker of Urdu, moved to newly
formed Pakistan, got into the cereal trade with Europe, and started making big
bucks. Destiny, though, had other plans for him.
Andre returned to Europe, to Paris,
in 1958 to be able to marry and live with Laura, Alexandra's maternal
grandmother, whom he met and romanced on a skiing holiday in Switzerland. Laura
was firm about not wanting to go to Pakistan. For Andre, it must have been a
professional setback, for he was close to the Pakistani ruling class and was a
good friend of the future Prime Minister Zulfiqar
Ali Bhutto. Love prevailed and brought him to an unfamiliar country, where
he bought and re-energised the Felix Potin
chain of grocery stores; sired Alexandra's mother, Corinne, who is today without
doubt the First Lady of Bordeaux; and bought Chateau Margaux in 1977.
The celebrated chateau, classified as
a First Growth in 1855, and whose famous admirers included the American
presidents Thomas Jefferson and Richard Nixon, was then in a state of terminal
decline. The French government, in a fiercely nationalist move that saw a re-run
when Vijay Mallya made a bid on Champagne Taittinger, had meanwhile blocked
an American attempt to acquire Margaux. The Ginestet family that had owned
Margaux since 1934 was in a precarious financial condition and the 1970s were a
difficult decade for Bordeaux. Some might have considered the acquisition a
foolhardy decision at that point in time, but it dramatically altered the
fortunes of the Mentzelopoulos family.
Andre Mentzolupoulos brought on board
the famous professor of oenology, Emile
Peynaud, to put Margaux back on track. Bordeaux's wine guru invested his
entire wealth of knowledge into ever stage of Margaux's, and its second wine
Pavilion's, development, till 1990. It was his favourite child and he left his
stamp of excellence on the wines that the chateau produced. But the man who
gave Margaux its new lease of life passed away suddenly in 1980, when he was
only 65. That was when his daughter Corinne, Alexandra's mother, came into the
business and together with her mother, Laura, she went about systematically to
restore Margaux's old glory, befitting a member of that exclusive club of the five
First Growths.
Corinne, who is said to exude
Mediterranean warmth, studied Classical Literature as an undergraduate student,
went on to get a Master's in Political Science and worked with a leading advertising
agency, Havas, before joining Felix Potin. It was his unexpected death, though,
that brought her to Margaux, with which she had previously very little to do.
She reconstructed the winery's aging
and decrepit cellars and fortuitously, when the process was complete, Bordeaux got
one of its most memorable vintages: 1982. It was a great year to announce that
Margaux was back in the reckoning. The next year, Margaux got a new estate
manager, an erudite young man named Paul
Pontallier, to replace the aging Philippe
Barre. Corinne and Paul, who is now the managing director of the company,
rewrote the Margaux story -- she with her sharp business sense and he with his
oenological competence -- and it has seen celebrities as diverse as the U.S.
basketball star Michael Jordan and
former Chinese President Hu Jintao
visit the chateau to partake of its history and its superlative wines.
In 1993, to reduce the burden of
managing a thriving business single-handedly, Corinne got the Agnelli family,
which owned Fiat, to acquire a 75 per cent controlling stake in Margaux. When
in 2003, the Agnellis announced that they were preparing to sell that stake, Corinne
bought it back and reclaimed the legacy that her family has been jealously
guarding since 1977. It is into this tradition that Alexandra, the youngest of
Corinne's three children, was inducted in the autumn 2012.
Margaux is certainly not the first
First Growth to make a serious attempt to pair with Indian cuisine. Wine snobs
may shudder at the thought, but some years back, at the initiative of Frederic Engerer, President of Chateau
Latour, the venerable First Growth hosted Hemant
Oberoi, Grand Master Chef of the Taj Group, to perfect the match between
Indian food and the fine wines of Bordeaux. Will Margaux and kebabs make a good
match on Saturday? Watch this space to find out all about it.
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