Wine Services. Such an anodyne name for a business. And arguably a strange one for a French outfit based in Bordeaux. The 14-year-old company has operated deliberately under the radar until now and I heard about it only on the grapevine but it has many of the world’s most famous wine producers on its books.
And they are obviously happy since the renewal rate is apparently 95%. Christian Seely, in charge of AXA Millésimes’ seven top-quality wine estates around the globe, says, for instance, ‘We are happy customers. We subscribe for a number of regular reports from them, some of them such as press and on-trade reports are daily.
‘They can tell a château, for example, which Michelin-starred restaurants in a given city have its wine on the list. Useful to know when they do, useful to know when they don’t so our commercial team can approach the restaurant.
‘It is not a cheap service but it is very detailed and thorough, and they are a pleasure to work with.’
So what exactly does Wine Services do? In the late noughties, Clément Marcorelles, who had worked for a couple of years for Moët Hennessy in New York, was struck by how little the producers of top-quality bordeaux, all of whom sell through middlemen, the Bordeaux négociants, knew about which restaurants and retailers actually bought their wine and how much they charged for it. He saw a niche in the market that would involve supplying this information to individual châteaux for a fee.
The idea was that Marcorelles, then 27, would survey the lists in top restaurants and offers from the most important merchants. Almost incredibly in our current digital age, he undertook his first survey, in 2010, in person, flying round the world to destinations including London, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Switzerland to gather information for just five initial clients, Châteaux Beau-Séjour Bécot, La Conseillante, Gloria, d’Issan and St-Pierre. Initially Wine Services was a spreadsheet on his laptop, a loss-making data-collection exercise, despite Marcorelles’ use of friends’ sofas and the cheapest airfares possible.
In an email he told me that some négociants were not thrilled by the idea of the châteaux having access to all this information but the châteaux owners themselves generally liked the idea, and appreciated the fact that he had no historic ties with the tight-knit Bordeaux wine community and could therefore approach the task objectively.
By 2012 he had his first non-French clients, the twin properties Ornellaia and Masseto in Tuscany (although the fact that their winemaker Axel Heinz has a Bordelaise wife and is so well plugged in to the region that he now runs Château Lascombes in Margaux may have helped to spread the word across the Alps).
Also in 2012 he was joined by Caroline Meesemaecker, pictured at the top of this article. She had been marketing pharmaceuticals around the world and came to Bordeaux because her husband was overseeing building work at Château Montrose for the powerful Bouygues family. The daughter of a wine collector, she passed the Wine & Spirit Education Trust Level 2 exam with distinction in 2013. She bought in to the business and has steadily increased her participation so that it has been 100% since 2022. (Marcorelles is now head of special projects for Jean Moueix, who runs the important négociant Duclot.)
By 2015 they had 60 or 70 of the best Bordeaux châteaux on their books but, keen to diversify further, they managed a big increase in their client base, with the likes of Champagne Taittinger and Ridge and Harlan in California signing up.
They have only five clients in Burgundy, mainly the biggest producers. The tiny quantities of myriad different wines made by each producer don’t really suit the Wine Services model.
Meesemaecker, a keen sailor, invites guests to celebrate 10 years as clients of Wine Services on the ocean wave. Brice Braastad took this picture of the first such celebration in 2022. Left to right François-Xavier Maroteaux (Branaire-Ducru), Annabelle Grellier (ex Palmer now at Yquem), Vianney Gravereaux (Ornellaia and Masseto), Augustin Lacaille (Vignobles Cruse-Lorenzetti), Caroline Meesemaecker and Matthieu Bordes (Lagrange).
An important part of what they do for their clients is compare their performance with that of specifically chosen direct competitors – which presumably does nothing to depress prices. It is a point of pride in Bordeaux to achieve a higher price for your wine than your neighbour.
They gather information not just on prices and distribution and their evolution but also mentions in the press and in some cases scores and tasting notes.
Wine producers have to sign up for periods of three years and prices vary according to the number of wines surveyed and the number of competitors they want to monitor. But the most common plan, costing €13,000 a year, encompasses one product, five competitors and 10 markets. For €23,000 a year they will report on 33 markets and both the on trade (hospitality) and off trade (retail).
Now that so many restaurants and merchants publish their wine lists and wares online, Wine Services has managed to scale up considerably so that today it has 175 clients in 10 countries. According to Meesemaecker, their client base is growing by 10–15% a year, notably in Italy, Champagne, California and South America. ‘In Bordeaux, it’s more stable’, she said tactfully.
Ah yes, the Bordeaux slowdown. Surely Wine Services is in an ideal position to monitor trends in the wine market. It does indeed release an annual overall review and, according to Meesemaecker, ‘Bordeaux is no longer leading the on trade. It’s now Italian wine. The Asian markets have been slowing down while the US is up a lot.
‘The UK is an amazing marketplace, with merchants there exporting a lot of fine wine.’ I’d known that, with their tax-free bonded warehouses and tradition of ageing stock, British fine-wine traders have long been supplying Bordeaux négociants with mature vintages, but had never had it quantified. Not that Wine Services was likely to quantify it in detail for me. Although its annual 15 million lines of data contain a huge amount of market intelligence, it’s shared only with clients. My observation to Meesemaecker that the company would be ideally placed to advise consumers on where to find the best-priced restaurant wine lists, for instance, fell on deaf ears. This would run counter to its strategy of ‘improving clients’ performance’.
But Meesemaecker readily showed me maps of both the French Riviera and London with dots for where the fine-wine hotspots are. According to Wine Services’ researches, the best London wine lists – by which it means those with the widest range of its clients’ wines – are Clos Maggiore in Covent Garden, the members’ club 67 Pall Mall, Les 110 Taillevent and Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester.
Also in London, Dom Pérignon, with 228 listings, is the best distributed wine in the 550 lists they monitor there. Gaja’s Italian wines have 150, and Château d’ Yquem 136. As for California, Ridge does best ‘on a brand perspective and Opus One for a single wine’.
The Yquem example shows up starkly, however, that, although it can monitor how often a wine shows up on a list (and LVMH have been on an aggressive programme of increasing listings of Yquem in London restaurants), Wine Services can’t monitor actual sales. Nor stocks. I know from my own experience that many restaurant wine lists are lists of wines of which they have remarkably few bottles. I have often done battle, especially with Parisian sommeliers, who try to persuade me not to order what I want, I suspect because they don’t actually have any.
But who am I to argue with Meesemaecker that Claridge’s is the best champagne bar in London? (Though I suspect not for the budget-conscious.)
She laughed hilariously when I asked her what advice she had for producers. ‘Subscribe to Wine Services of course. The wine market is changing a lot at the moment. There is huge competition. Don’t do as you did historically. For example, China is not buying now, but Nigeria is growing, as are Taiwan, Dubai and Canada. Take decisions on real facts. It’s not possible to do things alone. You need smart people to help you. ROI is key.’
So proprietary is its information, and so fearful have they been of the emergence of a competitor, that Wine Services has only just launched a company website, now confident of their unique records.
The company is continuing to spread its wings. A spirits division is to be launched in October, and since January this year, more controversially, it has started to monitor exactly where the négociants sell specific wines. It took two years to get approval for this from the négociants’ association, so secretive are some of them. But it should give their tally of data a real boost.
So what does Meesemaecker choose to drink at home? ‘I love to drink Champagne! Bollinger Special Cuvée for a usual evening and Jacques Selosse to celebrate. I love also mineral and straight wines with Chenin – exceptional wines!
‘As for red wines, I love to explore different regions. I have the chance to receive gifts from our clients all over the world, tasting the most prestigious wines. Difficult to say which one is my favourite when we taste the best wines!’
