We may very well be the oldest luxury brand in the world,” says Prince Robert de Luxembourg, seated in a vaulted salon of Château Haut-Brion, the turreted 16th-century castle in Bordeaux, France, whose name and image grace his flagship wine. A courtly, bespectacled gentleman, Luxembourg, 39, looks very much at home here—certainly more so than he would have on a frenetic film set, where he might have been today had he pursued his earlier career as a screenwriter.
But when the opportunity to run a legacy nearly five centuries old arose, his life took a U-turn. Though his great-grandfather bought Haut-Brion in 1935, its origin dates to April 23, 1525, when one Jean de Pontac received the vineyards as part of his bride’s dowry. Two decades later, de Pontac built the first château expressly for overseeing vinification. As the vineyards prospered, renown for their product spread. By the 1660s King Charles’s wine cellar across the Channel was stocked with it, and diarist Samuel Pepys recorded drinking “a sort of French wine called Ho-Bryan that hath a good and most particular taste I never met with.” In 1787 the American minister to Paris, Thomas Jefferson, made a pilgrimage to the estate, where he ordered six dozen bottles.
Prince Robert de Luxembourg
Over the centuries, Haut-Brion passed through the hands of several owners—including Prince Talleyrand—but its quality endured. In 1855 it was classified by the French authorities as one of only four premiers grands crus, or first growth, vineyards, along with Lafite, Latour and Margaux (Mouton Rothschild was elevated to this pantheon in 1973). The ultimate wines, premiers crus are acquired by oenophiles much like works of art or stock portfolios. Indeed, in the rarefied premier cru world, a new vintage is issued like an IPO: After the fall harvest, estates sell the wine to brokers, or négociants, en primeur, as futures, before it ferments in barrels for two years. Even after bottles are delivered to market, they are generally cellared for at least a decade, until they reach maturity. A series of recent stellar harvests has resulted in record prices. Futures for bottles of 2005—considered one of the great vintages in memory—have doubled in value since they were introduced, to about $900 as of this past summer. “Unlike other luxury brands, we can’t make more,” says Luxembourg, a reference to his finite 106 acres.
Luxembourg is the product of American riches and European nobility. His maternal great-grandfather was financier Clarence Dillon, who snapped up Haut-Brion in 1935, during the depths of the Depression, for about $150,000. Grandfather Douglas Dillon served as U.S. ambassador to France under Eisenhower before he became JFK’s treasury secretary. In 1967 Luxembourg’s mother, Joan, was wed to Prince Charles de Luxembourg, brother of the Duchy’s reigning grand duke. Robert was born the following year at Schloss Fischbach and enjoyed a storybook childhood until nine years later, when his father died of a sudden heart attack at age 49. “It turned our world upside down,” he says today. After attending a Benedictine monastery boarding school in England, he lived in London for a year, then in Washington, D.C., where he studied philosophy at Georgetown University. In 1987 he met his future wife, Boston-raised Julie Ongaro, in Dark Harbor, Maine, where his family has a summer house.
