Nicholas Potel's Domaine de Bellene.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Serious business

It might be easy to dismiss Potel as a hippie dreamer if we weren't lunching in a fancy hotel dining room and preparing to open a bottle of wine that might have consumed my entire paycheck if I'd been paying.

This is a man, however, who has assumed control of a family winery, lost the business - and the family name on the label - in a series of upheavals with rival investors that began with his father's death. Since that testing in the school of hard knocks, he is running not one but three impressive wine businesses. Beyond the new family vineyard Domain de Bellene, his Maison Roche de Bellene buys grapes from other vineyards that are at least 60 years old, producing numbered bottles of Grand Cru with his own styles. Finally, he combs the cellars of the most famous producers in Burgundy, and releases choice vintages under his Collection Bellenum.

His own vineyard was created in 2006, and Potel's wine enjoys some natural advantages in the Chinese market: It's French, exclusive and expensive. While it's not Bordeaux, the French red that resonates so strongly with Chinese consumers, it has an impeccable pedigree: Domain de Bellene was built on an 18th-century estate in the town of Beaune, renowned as the wine capital of Burgundy.

His father, Gerard, founded the Potel family wine business in the 1960s, when France was still reviving from World War II and wine-making was not always the most profitable business. There is a romance about French wine-making that suggests a constant approach that goes back centuries, but the Potels were riding a wave of change.

"After the war, under de Gaulle, the mission of agriculture was to be self-sufficient, then globally to feed the planet," says Nicolas Potel. "It was a time of chemicals and clones - we chose grape varieties that produced more grapes, instead of grapes that produced more quality."

The younger Potel feels lucky to be making wine now rather than in the 1970s, when those pressures were peaking. "The industry is not so into chemical acidification now. We have changed our ideas about vine management, and look for better compost and better soil."

Consumers have changed their ideas, too, and health and food safety have become mainstream concerns. Small wineries like his can deliver a level of quality that's beyond the business model of big producers.