The vineyard’s oak barrels
In 1992 Ongaro tried her hand at writing a historical screenplay based on Don Juan. Luxembourg’s sometimes caustic critiques of her efforts led her to challenge him to pick up a pen and help. “I had no idea how a screenplay format worked, but we developed a partnership where we would talk and write,” he recalls. After sending the screenplay off to Hollywood, they were somewhat amazed when “an agency called CAA,” as he says, phoned to sign them as clients. The couple soon found themselves enjoying extended stays at the Four Seasons, working on that script and others. Though Steven Spielberg considered the Don Juan screenplay, none of their projects was made. Still, by the standards of Hollywood, the duo found considerable success via their commissions.
But just as their lives seemed to be shifting toward Los Angeles, fate intervened when a stroke incapacitated Luxembourg’s grandfather in 1994. Since 1975 Haut-Brion had been officially run by Joan—later in partnership with her second husband, Philippe de Noailles, the Duc de Mouchy—but the family soon decided they needed to groom someone from the younger generation to take the reins in the future.
“I was an obvious choice,” says Luxembourg, whose sister, Charlotte, is a theater producer in London. “I’m part of the furniture, to a degree. At the age of three or four, I spent a good amount of time in a sandbox right there”—here he points out the window—“while my mother was redoing the château.” Luxembourg was forced to choose between his fledgling writing career and the wine business. Realizing how useful he could be to the latter, he moved back to Europe with Ongaro (with whom he now has three children) in 1994 and later assumed management of the company.
The house’s petit salon
Even though, as Luxembourg says, “I knew a good glass of wine,” he had no real background in the business end of Domaine Clarence Dillon S.A., the parent company, which had acquired the neighboring grand cru classé des Graves estate of La Mission Haut-Brion in 1983. Sensing untapped potential at La Mission, a property almost as old and esteemed as Haut-Brion, Luxembourg invested heavily there, constructing a top-quality production facility. His efforts have paid off, as the ratings and prices of its vintages attest. Futures for 2006 bottles were selling this summer for as much as $500, making the grand cru even more valuable than almost all of the more prestigious premiers crus that year except Haut-Brion.
Luxembourg also expanded his market with the launch of Clarendelle, the wine equivalent of a bridge line, two years ago. Wines from other vineyards are bought; then, after a rigorous selection process, they’re blended to make Clarendelle. When its first bottles—priced around $20—were released, a predictable outcry arose from some conservatives, who saw the strategy as tainting a sterling name. Nonsense, says Luxembourg, noting that he is not “pandering” to popular tastes by making wines that taste like “strawberry jams…. These wines use our extraordinary brain pool and retain our own special character.” And then, with the sincerity of the rare person who has moved with relative ease between the worlds of CAA and A.O.C.: “We are marrying modern and old.”
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