The 32nd episode of the Wine Makers Show, your wine podcast, introduces Alexandre Lazareff. As head of the Pain, Vin & Company agency, he shares all the secrets behind communication in the wine world.
Can you start by introducing yourself?
I’ll just tell you one thing. I’m passionate about wine, and I had the chance to bring my professional life in line with that by creating Pain, Vin & Company. I can talk about my passion for wine. Wine has always been an important matter in our family. First, we have a vineyard in Burgundy: we’re very small owners. We always drank wine at the table, and my parents always bought wine from estate owners. I only discovered the existence of the wine merchant’s trade very late. Wine was always something serious at the table, and I always felt like an amateur or an outsider to the wine world, but I had the chance to get into it.
How did this introduction to wine come about?
Picture a perfect family that goes three times a year to visit the uncle who owns the estate. Dad and Mum taste down in the wine cellar, and the children are packed off upstairs to watch TV. The uncle who owns the estate doesn’t once look at the little boy who wanted to catch his eye. Time goes on, and the little boy makes the front page of the Bien Public once, twice, three times. At that point, the uncle looks at the little boy a bit differently, starts talking to him and introducing him to the vineyard. That’s how I got into the big leagues in Burgundy. I’d had the chance to preside over a sale at the Hospices, at night admittedly, and another time to preside over a tastevinage at Clos Vougeot, and to lay a plaque with the sub-prefect at Clos Vougeot. I was a minor notable at the time, I was around 25.
Why did you do Sciences Po and the ENA if wine was a passion for you?
I was the perfect little boy, respectful of his father, his teacher, the officers. This perfect little boy followed the perfect path to please his father: Sciences Po, doctor of law, the ENA, the Ministry of Finance, local councillor. At one point, this little boy said to himself, “But what do I actually want?” I wanted restaurants, wines, and gastronomy. And that’s when I veered a bit off the path that had been decided for me by others.
When you do the ENA, you have the prefecture internship. Did you have wine on site?
Disaster. My other passion is climbing, and I’d asked the head of internships for a small mountain department. He told me, “I’ll offer you a small mountain department.” I ended up in the Cantal, where there was no climbing but also no skiing. So that wasn’t when I got to satisfy my passion for wine. That said, the prefect’s driver had pointed me towards the little eateries in the Cantal. They weren’t really restaurants, but cooks would pull products out of the cupboard, and there was a local know-how.
How did your early career in wine go?
I deliberately sabotaged my career. While I was at the Ministry of Finance, I wrote a guide to Parisian tea rooms. Then a guide to Parisian restaurants. All my colleagues who hoped to become department heads or directors immediately saw that I had no future. These guides with Hachette did very well. I wanted to be a food critic, and I had the wonderful luck that Le Figaro entrusted me with five pages a week in the Saturday edition, which was the most read. There was a trend for tea rooms. It was the era when tea rooms were starting to become real meeting places, even though they still carried an old image. I took advantage of it to slip away for half an hour every two or three days.
How did the publication of the guide go?
I’d written this book with a graduate of the École Normale. We had the carefreeness of youth. He went to Hachette, walked into the director’s office, and put the manuscript on her desk. Three days later, we got a call to be published.
You then became a food critic at Le Figaro?
It wasn’t all that easy. Doing the ENA is easy if you’re well supported, if you have the right family background. It’s much more about the amount of work than the person’s intelligence that counts. When you work like a beast for three years, you have a good chance of passing the exam. Being a food critic is much, much more complicated, and that’s what I really wanted. I asked all the newspapers. While I’d asked Le Figaro for nothing because I’d never have dared, it was the director of Le Figaro who contacted me after seeing my guides. I said “yes” right away.
Do you remember your first piece?
It was about one of the restaurants I knew. You’ve caught me out: it was the Grand Veneur in Fontainebleau. It’s a restaurant out of time with a rotisserie like in the days of D’Artagnan.
Do you remember how you felt when you bought Le Figaro with your article in it?
To be very pretentious, there’s a transmutation of the written word. When you read what you’ve written, whether it’s a book or a newspaper, you don’t recognise yourself and you’re surprised. It’s no longer what you wrote: it’s an article.
What happens for you next?
It’s the circle of fame. You become a player in the small world of gastronomy. After four years at the Ministry of Finance, you do a rotation. At that point, the communications adviser for the city of Paris asked me to run the city of Paris radio station. Why did he ask me? Because he knew I was a Parisian food columnist. So I moved to the city of Paris and ran a radio station. I kept up Le Figaro and other newspapers, including Globe. I realised you can’t run a radio station if you’re not passionate about radio. On a professional level, the experience was interesting.
How long before you stopped?
After two years at Matignon, Chirac came back to the city of Paris with all the barons of Gaullism. Room had to be made for those who had rendered service. I found myself looking for a job. I didn’t even have time to look for one before I was approached by Jack Lang. He was looking for an ENA graduate who knew the world of gastronomy.
You join Jack Lang?
I became the Mister Gastronomy for the Ministers of Culture and Agriculture. I handled the promotion of cuisine for the ministries and two very concrete things: launching the Semaine du Goût and launching the inventory of France’s culinary heritage. It was very serious work to identify the endangered know-how behind everything that makes up our culinary heritage. We were a very big team. It was 9 years of work with around twenty collaborators in each region. This inventory was one of the arguments for getting France’s culinary heritage recognised by UNESCO. A few years later, friends suggested I create Chateau Online with them: an online wine sales site.
So you started Chateau Online, as a co-founder?
I was one of the four founders. I shared my office with Jean-Michel Duluc, who was the head sommelier of the Ritz. He was the wine man, I was the writer. I taught him to write about wine, and he taught me to taste wine. Chateau Online was a pioneer that went badly afterwards. I’ll only talk about the heroic period. We selected wines that captured the identity of each terroir and had created a tool so everyone could buy them online. We were leaders in the category. The conditions for profitability weren’t there: it was the work of trailblazers. The difficulty wasn’t necessarily raising funds. On the other hand, the constraints of logistics and service: that’s where we were shaken.
What happens for you after Chateau Online?
I had two irons in the fire. I’d started the Pain, Vin & Company agency at the same time, with a partner. Neither he nor I was full-time on the agency, and I ended up choosing.
How did you feel about starting again from scratch to launch Pain, Vin & Company?
Both an enormous feeling of loneliness and a blind faith in the future. My father was my confidant, my best friend. He gave me a kick up the backside when he told me, “My boy, you’re so far below your potential, it might be time you got moving a bit.” I threw everything overboard to build my own business that would be the continuation of my journey and would let me have a blast with my team, doing what I love, which is wine and communication. So I set off with not much and took an enormous risk: five children and a loan. I went for it. When you’re determined, you go. The children didn’t know, because I left every morning and went to work. Gradually the first clients arrived. That’s when you lay the foundations. It’s the hardest part.
How did you find your first client?
It’s a very slow process. In the meantime, I was in this world and had met winemakers. I’d started to build up trust. I was able to lean on two or three clients who trusted me. All these people, I’d met before. We set off with them and started to define the roadmap.
What year did you create Pain, Vin?
I created it in two stages. The first with a partner in 2000, and the second alone in 2007 to focus on food and wine. It’s quite hard to get perspective on the different stages. What’s certain is that the only way to keep clients loyal is with results. The only way to win clients is to show your results. I was lucky to start with clients I kept for a long time. Pain, Vin has two characteristics in this world: incredible stability of the teams, incredible stability of the clients. They stay with us for a very, very long time. It’s a harmonious growth with the chance to win over benchmark clients little by little. Meeting the Maison Albert Bichot took us a step forward. Meeting the general union of Champagne winemakers was a major milestone with a great institution. Meeting Plaimont, which is a great, exemplary cooperative from the south-west, is impressive. We now have four or five cooperatives. The result is steady progress and the privilege of the long term. We have the determination to identify our clients and approach them gradually, year after year, and one day create a bond that leads to a collaboration. We had wine, now with around twenty very great benchmark estates. We also have spirits. We have wonderful products in gastronomy, like Kayser bread and Cluizel chocolate. At the start, we were a press agency. That’s an outside element that builds a message, tools, and gets coverage. Now we’re becoming an image strategy agency. There’s of course press relations, but everything around it too. Digital is well established with a team of five people, and events with the SNCF, which entrusts us with organising “Chefs de Gare” every year. We can only survive in this world by evolving on our own territory and in our own trades. Everyone thought bloggers were the way to communicate with new communities. It went up and it came back down. Influencers: it’s wonderful, but the big brands are starting to tire of them. The only influencers who work are the sincere ones, not the ones who sell themselves to brands for short-term stunts. Podcasters were unknown two years ago. Whereas now it’s a way of consuming audiovisual content that’s becoming part of our habits. Lives are the product of lockdown. Live tastings offer us unlimited prospects. Ten years ago, what made a press agency successful was a gifted press officer, super-connected, super-friendly with the big journalists. Today, what makes a great image strategy agency is the ability to grasp trends and adapt to crises. The big agencies have to be agile and invent new ways to make their clients and their products known.
Pain, Vin has been around for 13 years. What should we wish you for the future?
What you should wish me is the desire, the enthusiasm, the idea of taking on new challenges. Internationalisation, for example: for some of our brands, we work with linked agencies in the English and American markets. We run campaigns in Paris, London, and New York. Every year new challenges open up. I consider that I was so far below my potential that I still have a few years to reach that full accomplishment. There’s one thing I haven’t done, and that’s external acquisitions. I don’t want to build a roll-up model. I want to keep growing while always staying a human-sized structure with a close-knit inner circle. Enthusiastic people need stabilisers, and we work as a team.
I have a bottle of Clos Beaudier in Pommard next to me. Can you tell us about this wine adventure?
My uncle was, for me, the great man of the family, beyond my parents. Gradually, thanks to the media coverage I was able to get, he started talking to me. He put me in his will with a magnificent note: “This way, Alexandre, you’ll never be thirsty again.” So I found myself in the 1990s with a vineyard in Pommard. I have 2.40 ouvrées. An ouvrée is what a worker did in one day. 2.40 ouvrées is really not much. I found myself with a tiny vineyard in Pommard. I didn’t really know who should farm it. I asked my uncle’s nephew. He treated me like a Parisian. The wine was not bad but nothing special. One day we went to do the harvest. And there, my children said to me, “Dad, why are we the only ones in the vines? Why are there leaves in the vat?” Bringing in my winemaker friends, I see that all the vine stocks are lined up impeccably, like a military cemetery. One of the great winemakers of Pommard tattled and said, “They harvest by machine.” So I sacked the nephew and entrusted this vineyard to Albéric Bichot, who in the meantime had become my friend and who made a real wine out of it. We made a very painful choice: we tore everything out to replace these clones with a massal selection. We now have individual vines that make a real wine, and a vineyard cultivated with good sense. Of course, there’s the soil that everyone talks about, but the plant material is very important. You have to invest in very high-quality vines.
Do you have a wine book to recommend to me?
It’s not easy because we have a lot of wine books. One book made a big impression on me: A World History of Wine. This book is fascinating because it explains that whoever controlled the world economy imposed the taste of wine. When the English dominated the Atlantic, Bordeaux was a claret; in the Parker era, we made Parkerised wines; when the Chinese became major buyers, we made wines that pleased them.
Buy this book.
What’s your latest favourite tasting?
I was invited to the table of Renan Laborde, owner of Château Clinet. He of course brought out his Clinet. But since he’s open to other vineyards, like the great winemakers, he brought out a Clos Saint Hune from the Trimbach estate. They say it’s the Romanée Conti of Alsace. It was absolutely splendid. With Comté, the Château Chalon, a vin jaune from Macle: it’s a food and wine pairing as obvious as love.
Who should be my next guest on this podcast?
I’m not going to fall into the trap of recommending my own clients. I’d advise you to interview Manuel Peyrondet, who created Chais d’Œuvre and invented a new way of selling rare wine to enthusiasts.
