Wine service. Such a boring name for a company. And probably a strange one for a French company based in Bordeaux. The 14-year-old company is (intentionally) so low-key that I only heard about it through rumors, and yet it has many satisfied, high-profile customers.
“You can tell a château, for example, which Michelin-starred restaurants in a particular city have its wine on the menu,” says Christian Seely, who is responsible for AXA Millésimes’ seven top estates around the world. “The service is not cheap, but it is very detailed and thorough.”
So what exactly does Wine Services do? In the late 2000s, Clément Marcorelles, who had worked for Moët-Hennessy in New York for a number of years, was amazed at how little the producers of top-quality Bordeaux wines knew about which restaurants and retailers were actually buying their wine and how much they were charging for it. (Sales have always been made through Bordeaux wine merchants.) He saw a gap in the market, which was to pass this information on to individual châteaux for a fee.
The idea was that Marcorelles, then 27, would scour lists of the best restaurants and deals from major retailers. He conducted his first survey in person in 2010, something almost unthinkable in today’s digital age. He flew around the world to destinations including London, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Switzerland to gather information for just five initial clients, Bordeaux châteaux Beau-Séjour Bécot, La Conseillante, Gloria, d’Issan and St-Pierre. At first, Wine Services was a spreadsheet on his laptop, a loss-making data-gathering exercise, although Marcorelles used friends’ couches and found the cheapest airfares.
In an email, he told me that some wine merchants weren’t keen on the idea of the châteaux having access to all this information. However, the château owners themselves generally liked the idea and appreciated the fact that Marcorelles had no historical ties to the tight-knit Bordeaux community and could therefore approach the task objectively.
In 2012, he won his first non-French customers with the twin estates Ornellaia and Masseto in Tuscany.
Also in 2012, Caroline Meesemaecker joined him. She had been marketing pharmaceuticals worldwide and came to Bordeaux because her husband was overseeing construction work at Ch Montrose for the powerful Bouygues family. She bought into the business and steadily increased her share. Today she is CEO. (Marcorelles left the company in 2022 and is now head of special projects for Jean Moueix, who runs the all-important wine merchant Duclot.)
By 2015, Wine Services had 60 to 70 of the best Bordeaux châteaux on its books, but was keen to diversify even further and was able to significantly expand its client base, adding Champagne Taittinger and Ridge and Harlan in California, for example.
However, the company only has five customers in Burgundy, mainly the largest producers. The tiny quantities of the countless different Burgundies that each producer makes do not really fit its model.
An important part of the work the company does for its clients is to compare the performance of the wine with that of selected direct competitors. This presumably does not help to drive down prices, since in Bordeaux it is a point of pride to get a higher price for your wine than your neighbor.
Wine producers must sign up for a three-year period. Prices vary depending on the number of wines studied and the number of competitors they wish to monitor, but the most common plan costs €13,000 per year and covers one product, five competitors and 10 markets. For €23,000 per year, reports are produced on 35 markets, as well as the hospitality and retail sectors (the former hospitality, the latter retail).
With so many restaurants and retailers now publishing their wine lists and merchandise online, Wine Services has been able to expand significantly. Today, the company has nearly 200 clients worldwide and a 95 percent renewal rate. Meesemaecker says the client base is growing 10 to 15 percent annually, especially in Italy, Champagne, California and South America. “It’s more stable in Bordeaux,” she said tactfully.
Ah yes, the downturn in Bordeaux. Surely Wine Services is in an ideal position to monitor trends in the wine market. In fact, the company publishes an annual overview and, according to Meesemaecker, “Bordeaux no longer leads the wine trade. Now it’s Italian wine.”
Although the more than 10 million data points contain a huge amount of market information, it is only shared with customers. My suggestion to Meesemaecker that the company would be ideally placed to advise consumers on where to find the cheapest wine lists in restaurants, for example, fell on deaf ears. This would run counter to its strategy of “improving customer performance.”
But Meesemaecker readily showed me maps of the French Riviera and London with dots marking the hotspots for fine wine. According to Wine Services’ research, the best London wine lists – those with the widest range of wines available to customers – are Clos Maggiore in Covent Garden, members’ club 67 Pall Mall, Les 110 Taillevent and Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester.
Dom Pérignon is the wine with the greatest distribution, with 228 entries, in the 550 lists it monitors in London. The Italian wines of Gaja have 150 entries and Ch d’Yquem 136. In California, Ridge is best represented as a brand and Opus One as an individual wine.
However, as the Yquem example clearly shows, while Wine Services can monitor how often a wine appears on a menu (and LVMH has run an aggressive program to increase Yquem listings in London restaurants), it cannot monitor actual sales. Nor inventory levels. I know from personal experience that many restaurant wine lists include wines of which they have remarkably few bottles. I have often, especially in Paris, struggled with sommeliers trying to persuade me not to order what I want, presumably because they don’t actually have it.
Meesemaecker laughed hilariously when I asked her what advice she would give to producers. “Of course you should subscribe to wine services,” she replied. And: “Don’t do it like you used to. China, for example, isn’t buying now, but Nigeria is growing, as is Taiwan, Dubai and Canada. Make decisions based on real facts.”
The information is so confidential and the fear of a potential competitor so great that Wine Services has just launched a website, relying on its unique data. The company is continuing to spread its wings, with plans to launch a spirits division in October.
So what does Meesemaecker drink at home? “I like champagne the most! Bollinger Spécial Cuvée for a normal evening and Jacques Selosse for celebrating. I also like mineral wines and pure wines with Chenin. Exceptional wines!”
“When it comes to red wines, I like to explore different regions. I have the opportunity to receive gifts from our customers from all over the world and taste the most prestigious wines. It’s hard to say which is my favorite when we taste the best ones!”
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