LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 41

hundred years, is still the top market, but the Japanese and Chinese are buying more and
more.
“When I go to Asia, it's like I'm a rock star,” she said. In Hong Kong she is asked to
autograph bottles and in Japan she was made into a character in a manga comic strip. The
château has always been part of her life. Her great-grandfather Daniel was a Belgian wine
merchant who bought the vineyard in 1955. The family eventually sold the property to
Robert Wilmers, an American banker, and his French wife Elisabeth. The Wilmers com-
pletely restored the eighteenth-century villa and asked Véronique to stay on, making her
the fourth-generation Sanders behind the exclusive label and the rare woman leader in
the stuffy wine hierarchy of Bordeaux.
She said one of her first changes as manager was to open the doors of the château to
tourism, albeit tourists at the high end.
In 2003, as Bordeaux city was beginning to draw tourists, she had a long conversation
with Mr. Wilmers about getting ahead of the trend and using tourism to boost the reputa-
tion of Château Haut-Bailly. She said she told him: “Let's consider tourism a new métier,
a new profession, in addition to what we do. We need to have a dedicated team for tour-
ism—get organized. If we open up to high-quality tourism, we will be better known as a
top-quality wine.”
Wilmers agreed despite a high cost that Sanders politely refused to disclose. Sanders
showed us how she built the tourism around the heart of the operation. We circled the
edge of those formidable old vines raised without chemicals, their heavy fruit about to be
harvested by hand and piled in small baskets. Sanders bent down over a squat vine and
cradled a bunch of grapes. “This is where all the work is done—90 percent of wine is made
here, outside, in the fields.”
Next we went to the outbuildings where the alchemy takes place: the vats and cellars.
They have been updated but not airbrushed. “My grandfather insisted that cellars be
humble; he said they are cellars, not cathedrals.”
Then we headed to the small boutique, the first part of the new “métier.” The shop
sells books, goblets, decanters, aprons, tee-shirts, but very little wine. Château Haut-Bailly
is not aiming for the large tour bus crowd that generally buys inexpensive “souvenir” wine.
“We want them to buy our wine when they return home,” she said.
The true focus of the tourism trade was two new large reception and conference rooms
built for meetings, seminars, meals and tastings. Lunches are served at $154 per person
and dinners at $196 a person, always accompanied by a variety of the château's wines. To
insure the food matched the wine, Sanders hired a young chef from a three-star restaurant
to supervise the kitchen.
At first, her boss wondered why he was shelling out so much money for these “indirect
benefits,” said Sanders, but now he is a convert. She has no trouble filling up her bookings