01 sep The Amazing Story of a Lady in Wine
In Geraldine Point’s office at Maison Madame Veuve Point hangs a large portrait of a woman with an unwavering gaze. During a moment of intense reflection, Geraldine lifts her head and looks into them. “I sometimes find inspiration there,” she says. “She was strong, intelligent, had an incredible sense of family and commercial vision. She is one of the finest examples I try to follow.” The woman in the portrait is Jeanne-Marie Point. The family had farmed the property since 1879. It was only with her marriage that the estate turned to wine. In 1903, at 26 years old, she became a widow and single mother, taking sole charge of it alone. What she did next, a self-taught rise that culminated, in a Grand Prize at the 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair, presenting her first vinification as woman winemaker, is the kind of origin story wine brands invent for marketing decks. This one happens to be true. But the more interesting story is not Jeanne-Marie’s. It is how her Great-Great-Granddaughter came to inherit not just a name, but a voice.
A Child’s Garden
Geraldine did not grow up hearing about Jeanne-Marie secondhand. She grew up in Cairo, but spent her summer holidays next to Benoit, Jeanne-Marie’s son, the man she calls her Great-Grandfather, and knew him until she was seventeen. “It was really a luck for me to share time with him, as he explained me this and his incredible story directly,” she says. Her childhood memories of the vineyard are not curated brand imagery. They are specific, small, and hers: the green of the leaves changing with the seasons, the limestone outcrop of the Roche de Solutre rising over what she considered, as a child, her own garden. She collected fossilized ammonites in the vines while he worked around her. “The light blue eyes of my Great-Grandfather, always joyful, breathing deeply when he moved through the foliage, cutting the extra leaves, with his head held high, a leather thong in hand, his movements were those of an orchestra conductor.”
She remembers labelling bottles at his side. Smelling the wine, because she was too small to taste it. Playing at being a child wine-seller for tourists who wandered through. “I still remember someone from America.” There was no pressure attached to any of it. “There was no weight, no request,” she says. “I was just sharing life and passion with my Great-Grandfather.” The turning point, if it can be called that, arrived when she was thirteen. Her Great-Grandfather asked her the question every child gets asked: what do you want to do when you grow up? Her answer came without hesitation. “Sell wine all over the world.” Nobody in the family had pushed her toward it. It was, she says, simply part of who she was.
Study, Distance, Return
Geraldine went on to study oenology, a decision she describes less as a leap than a formality. “It was logical for me: a need to learn, to compare and to broaden my knowledge.” She built an international career before returning to the family activities, and she is clear that the return was never really a decision at all. “It was already in me. My roots are there, and always have been.” Today, she runs the Maison together with her own husband. “It is great for me to have the chance to work with my husband,” she says. What the years away gave her was not distance from the house, but a wider lens to see it through. “A different way of living, another language, better understanding of other cultures and civilisations, a different way of considering wine,” she says. “It brought me a certain emotional closeness to people from other countries, and further broadened my curiosity about the world.”
Humble Excellence, Then and Now
Maison Madame Veuve Point’s guiding phrase, Humble Excellence, is not just a print on a brochure and above all a way of being. “We took the decision that we would never seek press coverage, never request to appear on TV,” Geraldine says. “We work hard to let the word of mouth do its job, to let our image grow through the quality of our bottles and our personality, happy to answer to people that request. We work hard with passion.” It is a direct echo of Jeanne-Marie, who sold wine from the estate door only; export was barely a concept in early 20th-century Burgundy. “Excellence was the result of the competition Madame Veuve Point won. Humble was her way of being,” Geraldine says. “I think we share the same kind of humble excellence, but with a wider ambition for our sales reach, due to the simplicity of traveling nowadays for people, and wine bottles.”
What She Would Ask Her
Asked what she would say to Jeanne-Marie if she could ask her one question about 1903, Geraldine does not choose a question about hardship or survival. She asks about the moment of the win itself. “What did you think about when you got that incredible degree?” she wonders aloud, then answers for her, gently. “It must have been a relief. It gave her a possibility to see the future with a little more hope and magic for herself and her son. But of course, I would like to hear her own answer, with her own heart.” Asked what has changed most for women in wine between Jeanne-Marie’s era and her own, Geraldine is matter-of-fact. “Women like Madame Veuve Point took that first step. It is still a challenge today to be a woman in the wine world, but I believe less so than at that time.” When doubt does arrive, she says, she does not lean on Jeanne-Marie’s memory alone. “I breathe and feel the family support, but not only hers, if I may say so, a multi-generational support: hers, her son’s, my grandfather’s and grandmother’s, my parents’ and aunts’, my brother’s, husband’s, children’s, and that of some great friends, and team at work.”
The Stage in Monaco
In February 2024, Geraldine stood on stage at an annual congress for the International Sommelier Association in Monaco, tasked with introducing 120 years of family history to a room she describes simply as “WOW”. Seventy nationalities of sommeliers were in the audience. She delivered the story in three languages, French, English, and German, sentence by sentence, choosing her words carefully so that everyone in the room could follow. Beside her was Serge Dubs, the sommelier crowned Best in the World in 1989, who tasted the house’s Pouilly-Fuisse and described it to the room with real intensity. “He is a great man, was wonderful, and used a touch of humour to lend me support, which I really appreciated,” Geraldine says. “It was a great achievement and a magnificent opportunity to present our wine and history to remarkable people from so many countries.” She closes the memory the way she closed the evening. “Merci!”
This article was created in collaboration with De Monnik Dranken, importer of Madame Veuve Point for The Netherlands.
An Unlikely Partnership
The house’s newest chapter began, in Geraldine’s telling, with a phone call she did not see coming. “I received a call, and I asked many questions. They chose us and made the proposal to me.” The caller was the Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts’ Club, and the partnership that followed, for the world launch of Rolls Royce first Electric car leans on a coincidence, both institutions are marking 120 years, but rests on something less coincidental underneath it.
“A love of precise work, a passion for production, a passion for giving pleasure to consumers or users, the longevity of history, being fully present, and a worldwide outlook,” Geraldine says, when asked what a Burgundy winery and a British car marque actually have in common.
What Comes Next
Ask Geraldine what she is changing and she points, tellingly, not to the wine but to the people around it. “We now have more people working together than they did, we work with 35 different AOP” she says. “We make no compromise on quality.” On the technical side of winemaking, she is candid about there being no grand secret to guard. “If you mind about the process, we have our way of doing it, but no secret.” Her ambition for the next decade is not stated in numbers. “Great Burgundy wines, with a history written by women,” she says, when asked what she wants people to think when they hear the name Madame Veuve Point. It is, in the end, the same portrait in her office looking back at her: a woman who took over in a year of loss and built something that outlasted her, watched now by a Great-Great-Granddaughter who spent her summers collecting fossils in the same rows of vines, and who was handed the story, not read it.
This article was written in collaboration with De Monnik Dranken, importer of Madame Veuve Point Wines for The Netherlands.
Geen reactie's