How winemakers in the south of France are turning rosé into a year-round wine

0:11Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. Today's programme is a gastronomic and hospitality adventure. First, we'll meet a married couple who left their well-established lives in southwest London to start over with a winery in Provence. We rifted everything, so we'd never made wine, we didn't speak French, we had three children into a lot of pressure and couldn't get it wrong. Later, we'll head to Vancouver Island to hunt for a treasured culinary ingredient with the help of some furry friends.

0:46It doesn't take long for Caesar's nose to jab at the ground just above the truffle as he and his tail points out a black paragord that he's been trained to sniff out since he was a puppy. And I'll be joined by Monocle's Fernando Augusto Pacheco with some hospitality news. Faye, what's on your radar? Hello Tom, we'll be talking here about the rise and rise of the best of lists and is that good business? More from Faye coming up later on The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

1:22You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Jeannie and Stephen Cronk are the husband and wife co-founders of Maison Mirabeau, the award-winning rosé brand they built after leaving corporate life in London behind for the vineyards of Provence. Since launching 15 years ago, they've turned that big move into a global success with their wines now sold in more than 40 countries and a range that includes everything from their signature rosés to a Riviera-inspired gin. Jeannie and Stephen stopped by Midori House on a recent trip back to London to chat with our Laura Kramer about the journey they've been on together.

1:55Stephen began by telling Laura how a career detour eventually led him back to where it all began with wine. I mean, I started my career in the wine trade, so I was obsessed about wine from quite an early age and started doing delivery, driving delivery trucks in London and did wine exams and then started selling. And so I was in the wine trade for the first 10 years of my career. Then I went into telecoms for 15 years and really missed the wine business. And the wine trade is special. And the whole world of wine is special. Everything's built around conviviality, drinking, eating, having fun. So it never feels like you're working, really.

2:33And I really missed it. And I met Jeannie when I was in one of my telecoms companies. She was the marketing lady and I was the sales guy. And yeah, three months after meeting her, I proposed. And then soon after we got married, I said, I want to give up my career and go make wine. What a dream. Received with great joy, of course. What did you say to, not the actual proposal, we know how that went, but the wider proposal about the wine. Well, listen, it did take quite a few years of socializing it with me because we had three kids as well. So there were a few other life events and Stephen had a really nice career.

3:10It took some time to actually persuade me to make the move. The compromise in inverted commas, but it wasn't a compromise at all. It was really, you know, the bit that's amazing about our story is that we agreed we will move to Provence. So fulfilling my love for Provence and Stephen's love for wine. So that was perfect. When that happened, how quickly did you feel like you're getting up and running? What was the first step besides the move? The first step was finding growers to work with. Because plan A was we would pay off the mortgage and go buy a vineyard, which sounds very romantic. But I was persuaded out of it by friends of mine in the wine trade.

3:46And it really helped that I had been in the wine business before. I had contacts with people who were going to burst my bubble and just make it more real and wanted to help me not make mistakes. So the idea was a little bit changed to, rather than buy a vineyard and become a farmer, We actually just build a brand first because there are hundreds and hundreds of producers in Provence. And we wanted to make sure we could stand out. I mean, we risked everything. I was 45, basically turned my back on my career and couldn't get it wrong. So we thought, let's build a brand first and then try and separate ourselves from the rest of the pack and also focus on great liquid.

4:25So the first big challenge was finding the right growers to work with. And you say it was all about brand building. I imagine you did have these connections. You had worked in the wine industry before. But were people kind of thinking, who are these Brits coming over to France to do this wine? Yeah, they were. I think they felt sorry for us for having done what we did and speaking so terrible French. I mean, I didn't speak a word of French. So we'd never made wine. We didn't speak French. We had three children in tow, a lot of pressure. And one chance to get this right. So I think they gave us the sympathy vote.

4:55And they were amazing and really supportive. And we wouldn't be here without them. What about the name? We always wonder, like, what is the name? This is such an important, crucial part of a business, isn't it? How did you come up with that? Yeah, that is such a tough one. I must say we went through many names before we kind of settled on Mirabeau. Mirabeau was, you know, firstly such a beautiful sounding name, we thought. It also has meaning. It means beautiful view or seeing beauty. Provence, you know, there is so much natural beauty, but also the wines are pink, you know, this wonderful pale pink.

5:29So we felt like it really was a name that was evocative, not just of the region, because obviously it's a historical name as well. There was the Count de Mirabeau, who was a very famous historical figure. So yeah, so we were quite actually quite bold and daring because nobody had trademarked the name. And so we just did it. And people afterwards went like, oh, my God, you guys, how did you trademark the name of such a famous, you know, sort of formerly noble family in France? And to be honest, yeah, we just, we obviously, not being French, I think we were a little bit more, we just thought, oh, this is a beautiful name, this works, you know, people can, it looks beautiful, people can pronounce it.

6:06And let's build our sort of brand universe around that name. And you've just celebrated an anniversary, haven't you, for the brand? Yeah. So we've just made our 15th vintage. Yeah, it's gone so fast. My gosh. But it's the hour, it was 15 and a half years ago, I took my first bottle of wine in to meet the waitress buyer. I was terrified. I mean, he didn't know how much was at stake, but this was our career, our lives potentially at stake here. So, yeah, when he said, okay, Stephen, I'll try the wine, I'll think about it. I had two weeks of not sleeping, basically, but they came good. And, yeah, so we had 15 years on the shelves at Waitrose, and, you know, I am still very grateful they gave us their first big break.

6:50We're in about 40 countries now. The UK is still our biggest market. We're doing about 250 ,000 cases. So it's quite a big business now. And we're the number two Provence brand in the UK. We're the number one in the entree, which is hotels and restaurants. And yeah, it's been quite an adventure. And in terms of the product, you have a few variations now, a few vintages. Tell me a little bit about those. You know, we've got a number of products, I guess, pointing at different preferences, consumer preferences. So you've got our flagship product, which is pure. That's the one that's sort of, you know, really widely available and much loved.

7:28And that is just a great wine for, you know, light drinking, daytime drinking, aperitifs, lovely light food. And then we make some other wines that are a little bit more gastronomic, which is interesting because the consumer is now ready. You know, we've all been drinking here, especially in the UK and the US, obviously, you know, rosé for a good 10 years now. And we're quite often ready to explore different styles. So we also make some styles that are much more complex and actually more wines that you would have at the table. And in terms of vintages, I mean, we don't have huge vintage variation because we're not in that kind of wine business.

8:03And it's not really what the consumer wants. You know, they want a very natural product and a very well executed product, but they don't want one that tastes completely different from one year to the next. So we make sure that, you know, with our sort of, I guess, with our suppliers and with our technical processes, that people have a really great product every year. A little different year on year, but not sort of, you know, you have a signature that's always recognizable. And a bit like in champagne, I think, you know, people have their favorite champagnes and then Provence Rosés, people have their favorite Rosés.

8:35I was telling somebody about this interview. I was very excited about it. And they said to me, oh, but it should have been maybe at the start of summer because it's just rounding up rosé season. Does that frustrate you that there is kind of this seasonality about what people imagine when they can drink rosé? Because I would imagine if I was a grower, if I was a winemaker, I'd be like, oh, come on, guys. You can have it in different ways. How do you take that? Yeah, I mean, I agree. I'm a bit like you. You drink it all year round. You drink white wine all year round. Why not rosé? but again it's something that it is very summery and as much as I try and defend the fact that it should be 12 months a year consumed it's that kind of April, May time when you're dusting off the barbecue you have your first venture into the garden you go and buy a case of rosé and summer start and it's the same in the States so it is still very much perceived as being a summery wine but the reality is it's on the shelves all year round people are drinking it all year round there is a spike in the summer but it is a four-seasons wine.

9:37And may I say that Christmas is becoming a bit of a thing for rosé, so that's really nice because it is a great turkey pairing. So, you know, especially in the UK and the US, people are now sort of thinking, oh, that's a nice wine to put on the table for Christmas lunch. For Thanksgiving and Christmas of the wintertime. Yeah, it's becoming a bit of a thing. Yes, I was just going to ask, I always love to ask winemakers about their unusual pairings for their product. So you'd say, it's not unusual, but you'd say turkey? Yeah, it definitely works really well. I mean, it works really well with all white meats.

10:10You know, seafood's the obvious one. But actually some of the, I want to say, the slightly stronger rosés we make also work super well with spice, you know, and slightly more aromatic food too. So I think, you know, I'd encourage everyone to sort of venture out and just try rosé and do away a little bit with their preconceived ideas because, you know, today's rosés are just so well made as well. There's such a huge difference in quality, even compared to sort of 15 years ago. So, you know, we've really all worked super hard to make really great wines. I did try one of your other products at the Marlebone Hotel recently because I went for the 108 Bras.

10:46I did too. You had that collaboration there. Tell me a little bit about the importance of these partnerships for the brand, especially going forward. Yeah, so that's a lovely partnership we have in place with that hotel group. We try and collaborate on, you know, on lots of levels. It's just so great for any brand, really, because especially if the person you collaborate with, and we will select them fairly carefully, has, you know, similar values to you. We're B Corp certified, so we tend to kind of look for people who are also certified. We collaborate also with lots of, you know, other consumer brands to kind of enrich our audience and help each other out, which is lovely.

11:24But yeah, the 108, you know, there's sort of these activations, little terraces, you know, menus. That just works so well when a restaurant sort of goes, yeah, I can tweak my, what I'm serving a little bit to your wines. And I think you would have had a Toile, which is a slightly more gastronomic rosé. So it's still a beautiful terrace rosé, but it has a little bit extra oomph. So it works really well with food. It was delicious, I have to say. It was with this massive seafood platter too. So it worked really well. I was really enjoying myself. You mentioned being B Corp certified. How difficult was it for you to achieve?

11:58Because everybody says the process is actually so tough. You don't anticipate it when you go into it. Did you have that experience? Definitely. It's very tough. And I mean, we've had, you know, one person basically working full time on it. So we've had as a business, we've had to dedicate resource to certifying first time. We're now just recertifying and they've changed the process quite substantially. So we actually have to now adapt and learn, you know, how the new process is going to work. But you know, it's been a great certification because it gives you a sort of lens, you know, it gives you a monocle to kind of look at your business through and just to reframe how you work.

12:37And a lot of things are, you know, you realize you're on a journey, you haven't done everything perfectly because you just, you know, you didn't used to think like that. So that's what's great about B Corp is that it gives you lots of sort of matrices and ways to look at the world through the big cob lens and to kind of give you a stop think is this the right thing to do you know we've really tried to sort of make that universal within our business processes and all our sort of management team and people who work for us and it was tougher to retrofit it to a business that was quite mature i mean well worth doing but and gave us as genie said a very good framework but anybody's setting out with a new business, if they want to have any kind of purpose behind what they're doing, then they should look at building a business around that B Corp framework and to certify early.

13:24From the start? From the very beginning. What's next for you then? What can we look forward to? What are you most excited about? There's lots going on, is the good news. So we are a really sort of, you know, I guess quite a vibrant and innovative business. And yeah, so we're working on some really, we've done a really nice collaboration with FIFA Tree last year. So that was our first foray into upper mid-strength alcohol, which is something that, you know, was really exciting. And also to work with such an amazing British brand. So we're going to develop some other things for them. I can't tell you exactly what, but that's a really nice project.

13:57And then we want to do lots of creative things. So I will double down on this. And I've written a book this year, so I'll be doing a whole load of sort of also book publicity next year. And Stephen, yeah, Stephen's got lots of projects. Yeah, so my big thing is regenerative farming. We're the first Provence Rodeo brand to be certified regenerative. and I want to take this to the rest of our range over time and to the rest of the wine trade too. So I started a non-profit four years ago called the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation and I'm trying to persuade the whole wine industry to go regen.

14:28It's just such a powerful way of farming, bringing nature back into your vineyard, moving away from this monoculture mindset and actually focusing on soil health, encouraging biodiversity, carbon sequestration, water, tables improving. There's nothing to not like about it And this is going to be the big buzzword in the next five years. You're seeing a little bit on the shelves in the UK, some regenerative farming in the States. Whole Foods has really embraced it. California has just legally defined regenerative agriculture. So it's really kicking off in California. But it's so important to think people care about how things are made.

15:03And you mentioned the U.S. there. How much of a footprint have you made in America so far? I'm trying to crack the U.S. is a tough market because it's basically, it's like 50 countries in one. And I don't even know this, but you have in the US a three-tier system. So when you went through the prohibition in the 30s and that was repealed, they said that nobody could go directly to the producer. You had to have an importer. So we have to have an importer, a distributor, and a retailer, each taking a margin and making it more expensive. And so cracking the US is my big dream. Actually, I'm moving to L.A.

15:39for a couple of months. Yeah. Because California is where it's happening on the regen side, and I want to really push that. And I imagine all the tariff stuff isn't making it particularly easier. Yeah, that really doesn't help. 15 % tariffs on, well, all European products, not making it a lot easier. But actually, you know, still European wines compared with U.S. wines, we're still coming in at a better price normally. So I think we can still make a difference. And Provence rosé is a bit like champagne. I mean, you know, yeah, there are other people making similar looking products, but you've got to have the real thing.

16:11It's got to be from Provence if it's rosé. That was Stephen Kronk and Jeanne Kronk, the husband and wife co-founders of Maison Mirabeau. You can find out more by heading to MaisonMirabeau.com. And do look out for Jeanne's book, At Home in Provence, recipes and stories from life in the south of France.

16:36You're listening to The Entrepreneurs, to Vancouver Island now, where an experiment in farming is turning a culinary luxury into a thriving local enterprise. The highly prized Perigore truffle, more often found in Southern Europe, is now thriving on Canadian soil. In this report, Lucy Hislop meets Virginia Britska, whose forward-thinking approach has made her family farm the first in Canada to cultivate the precious black truffles. with a little help from her Legotto Romagnolo Doc Caesar and mini pig Clarence. We had Clarence as a mini pig about five years ago and it was our son who had always wanted this mini pig and we thought, well, you know what, mini pig and truffle hunting, let's do this thing.

17:23So Clarence came to our farm. My husband and I decided we wanted to go on a truffle hunting date in the plantations and right away Clarence was the winner. He found the truffle instantly. And so Clarence and I are struggling because of course Clarence is pig-headed and he wants to eat this truffle. And he's squealing and Pete comes running and Caesar comes running to see what's happening. And here it is, me and this little mini pig having a wrestling match. And let's just say Clarence got to eat his truffle and we realized that minipigs aren't the best for hunting truffles. I know in Italy you'll see a lot of farmers that have missing fingers and now I know why, so he's no longer a fancy truffle hunter.

18:10With Clarence firmly retired, it's Caesar that's in charge of scouring the 40-acre forested farm in Parksville, with Mounts, Arrowsmith and Moriarty as its backdrop. the result of two decades working out just which tree would work best for the prized truffles here on the west coast. So when we started we tested hundreds of varieties of trees so we inoculated them and then we had to wait a year to two years and look at the roots of these seeds that have been grown and see if they're actually hosting and what when you say hosting under a microscope that looks like a little nodule on the root. And so if they hosted, they were a candidate for truffle production.

18:57We had a few trees. We had the paper birch. We had the hazelnut and we had the gary oak that hosted beautifully. We also had some of the evergreens that did too. Next step was to now put them in the ground and see if they would produce. We did a little trial project and after a few years, we realized that the Gary oak and the hislenut were the two producing trees, and that's what we grow on our property today. The hislenut produces a sweeter truffle than the Gary oak, and the texture of it is a lot finer.

19:37Along with those trees and the farm's broad-breasted turkeys, Rhode Island red chickens, and Cotardin sheep, There's a symbiotic nature to creating the perfect conditions for the elusive truffle sought by the local chefs. Some of whom have even helicoptered over from Vancouver to take them home for expectant diners. When we brought the black paracord truffle to the island, we realized that we needed to amend our soil or pH. So we have a few things that we do to amend our soil. We have chickens and chicken tractors. And so a chicken tractor is like a frame that is open from the bottom. I mean, we pull them along up and down the rows of the plantation.

20:17And as they eat the grass and bugs, they end up changing the pH and help amend our soil. And then on top of that, we need to lime our soil to get down to that 7 pH that we need, somewhere between 6.5 to 7. The sheep, they help us with cutting grass, of course, because when a truffle is brooding, it burns the grass with its off-gassing, which creates a little brown patch. And with the sheep cutting the grass, it gives us the opportunity to have the dogs smell the truffles and kind of hones us in on where the truffles are ripe and fruiting. Hunt Caesar, come on, let's hunt. Let's go. Come on. As we head out among the oaks and hazelnuts to inspect the wood wide web, It doesn't take long for Caesar's nose to jab at the ground just above the truffle, as he and his tail points out a black paraguad that he's been trained to sniff out since he was a puppy.

21:19At its height, the farm can scoop up a wheelbarrow load of the prized, expensive underground fungi in its British Columbian season. Some as big as a palm, others the top of a thumb in size. So a lot of people are surprised that the Vancouver Island can host truffles. We have wild truffles here. I believe it's in Oregon White, but we don't know of a lot of people that have cultivated and the black paragord is so superior. Elba White is in our near future. We have planted some Elbas and we're into year three with Elba White. So it'll be a few more years to see if we'll be producing. They're still hosting.

22:00We dig up little bits of the roots to see however time is going to tell. Steps away in the Britsky's kitchen, local chef Nick McKay-Finn of Pepper Custom Catering cleans up the truffle before shaving and pairing it with Dungeness crab, beef carpaccio and even blackberry cheesecake.

22:24The fact it's only a couple of minutes out of the ground rather than days across the ocean is everything to him. I heard the term the other day, jet fresh, meaning that it's picked completely underripe, ripens on an airplane, and then gets here. It's almost two completely different products. You have a tomato that smells like a tomato. You have a truffle that smells like a truffle. You have the ability to kind of support local and eat in season, and in turn, you get a better product for it. We have really nice summer truffles, beautiful, aromatic, almost buttery in smell, a little bit, I guess, lighter of a flavor, kind of, I guess, the difference between a red wine and a white wine.

22:59Still very full-bodied, delicious and almost creamy in smell. And we have a couple of winter truffles as well. Really pungent, really kind of forefront in flavour. I find those kind of pair a lot better with the beef carpaccio that we'll be doing today. Whereas the summer ones, I kind of like to use more for seafood than the crab. Robust and sweet, every bite has more than a hint of the forest floor and pure tenacity. Even the nearby turkeys seem to applaud. For Monocle, in Parksville, Vancouver Island, I'm Lucy Hislop.

23:37Thanks to Lucy Hislop for that report and you can find out more by heading to thetrufflefarm.ca.

23:54Finally on today's programme, I'm joined by Monocles' Fernando Augusto Pacheco. Faye, welcome back to The Entrepreneurs. It's a pleasure to be here. Now, Faye, you trailed at the top of the show the importance or otherwise of these best of lists, particularly in the hospitality industry. I know Michelin guides, people very familiar, of course, with their assessments of restaurants. Maybe slightly less so on the hotel front, but we've learned more about their key winners, one, two and three key winners. But before we get into the detail, is this a good idea generally that people are so interested in these ratings?

24:27I am conflicted. And first of all, I have to say, this is not a new thing. The best of lists, usually magazines used to do that, newspapers from Condé Nast Traveller to Travel and Leisure. I don't know, the Sunday Times Travel. Monocle has been known to throw a few best of lists out there. Exactly. So watch where you're walking with us from. And I have to say, as a reader, I love a good list. So that's why I'm conflicted. So at the moment, we have World's 50 Best, which, again, they started with restaurants and bars, but now they have their own hotel list. So they recently announced, in fact, this week, the number 51 to 100.