Is there a future for Bordeaux’s 200 year old wine guide?

Stéphane Zittoun made his first visit to the Editions Féret offices on December 26, 2018, made an offer to buy the business on December 31, and closed the deal in February 2019. The whole thing took less than two months from start to finish.

In doing so, he became owner of an iconic name in wine publishing, dating back over 200 years, but that had long since ceased making money. Its iconic guidebook Bordeaux et ses vins had struggled to keep up with the changes in the publishing landscape, and had passed out of the Féret family ownership in 2016. Since then it lurched from one disaster to the next, opening a bookshop in a prime location in central Bordeaux that closed down within a few years, and failing to keep hold of key staff members.

Although the offices were – and are – located in the elegant heart of the city, overlooking the wide expanse of Place des Quinconces, Zittoun had his work cut out for him, and at times has wondered if he was crazy to take it on.

‘I fell in love with history and potential of this name that means so much in history of Bordeaux,’ Zittoun told me when we met up in his offices last week. ‘It’s an important historical resource for the Bordeaux wine industry, and I feel a real responsibility to bring it back from brink and into the modern era. But the biggest question I faced on arrival was one shared by many modern publishers: how do you make something worth paying for when information is freely available everywhere?’.

Origin story
The publishing house Editions Féret was founded by Jean-Baptiste Féret in 1812, and found its niche in wine (after a bumpy start where Jean-Baptiste’s political leanings saw him leave France in a hurry), releasing books by 19th century leading wine figures such as Dr Jules Guyot, Alexis Millardet and Ulysse Ribereau-Gayon, who worked as an assistant to Louis Pasteur.

It became Féret et Fils in 1841, in recognition of the arrival into the business of Jean-Baptiste’s son Michel-Edouard Féret, the man who had the smart idea of asking his friend Charles Cocks, an English school teacher living in Bordeaux, if he would like to collaborate on a French edition of Cocks’ 1846 travel guide Bordeaux, its Wines and the Claret Country. Together they produced the inaugural, and greatly extended French version, coming out in 1850 as Bordeaux et ses vins, shifting the focus from travel to wine, under the name of both Cocks and Féret. It not only preceded the 1855 classification by five years, but in many ways set the tone for it, ranking the châteaux in order of merit.

But it was the next generation, Edouard Féret, who joined the family business aged 22 in 1866, who made the biggest impact. He worked on the guide (and more than 200 other books) for 40 years, regularly travelling many hundreds of kilometres on horseback visiting châteaux across the region, notebook in hand, to record his impressions. By the 1898 edition, Edouard covered 45 communes and 3,800 châteaux. He eventually published seven editions of the Guide Bordeaux et ses Vins (or Le Féret, as it was more typically known) before dying, so the story goes, of a heart attack at his desk, while finishing up the 1908 version. He left the company to his sons Félix and Charles.

With a new edition once or twice a decade, Le Féret was unparalleled in its reach, selling many thousands of copies. It had drawbacks (although you could say I am an unreliable narrator, as author of my own very different Bordeaux encyclopedia…). The earlier versions were full of useful authorial comments from Edouard, but the latest editions were more typically an index to the properties, with information sent by the chateaux themselves, rather than a true guide to their quality. That didn’t stop it containing useful data on who owned what, how the size of the properties changed over the years, but it suffered from not being clear who, exactly, it was aimed at – public or trade – as well as having to overcome the classic issue with legacy brands – plenty of people had heard of it, but few had picked up a copy in years.

New era
Zittoun’s background is in digital marketing rather than publishing. He founded, built up and then sold NP6, a digital marketing platform with offices in Paris, London, and Bordeaux, the city where he has lived for the past 30 years. By the time he sold up in 2021, NP6 had 500 clients globally, including Canal+, Boursorama, and the Casino supermarket group.

It’s already clear that this background is having an impact. Hard to believe, but until Zittoun’s arrival in 2019 there was no digital edition of Guide Bordeaux et ses Vins. That’s not to say that the print edition is dead – late 2024 will see 20th edition of the book but the focus now is online.

The USP has also been tightened up. Zittoun has clearly identified that the true clients of Féret are the châteaux themselves, and has set about turning it into a hugely efficient tool for them to build their own marketing. The site relaunched in March 2023, with estates paying from €450 per year to €2,000 to be present (they can choose if in the book and website or just online). But the intention is for them not to just hand over the information and then leave it static, but for them to see the site as an extension of their own systems.

‘Our intention is to make everything as simple as possible for the châteaux,’ says Zittoun. ‘All of the information that they are regularly asked for, whether by importers or regulators, can be stored with us, and we automatically generate it into whichever format they need, from technical sheets to QR codes, in eight languages. They have control over design and format, and what information they want to use’.

They are being given a boost in all of this by a new European Union regulation, coming in later this year. Starting December 8, 2023, all wine sold in the EU must display ingredient and nutrition information, accessed via a QR code.

Using the Féret tech, châteaux can add a minimum of 20 data points, up to 500 or more, whether details of blends, vintages, opening times, medals awarded, vinification techniques or key staff. They can decide how much they want to be made public, and how much they want to store privately, for the generation of customs documents, technical sheets or tracking internal processes.

Further services are planned, such as building relationships with journalists to taste wines outside of the usual key times like En Primeur, or white labeling all of this information for châteaux to present it as their own website. Covid in many ways provided the necessary space to develop – not financially, as funding six employees with no income was tough, but in terms of having the time to amass this astonishing data collection, and to build functionality in how to access it.

The memory of Bordeaux
Underpinning all of this is the one thing where Féret unquestionably stands apart. With 19 editions to date, it provides a historical snapshot of the region dating back to the early 19th century, and this too has been brought to life with the new website. The team has scanned and digitised all previous editions, 26,000 pages in total, so you can reach back through history, tracking the assault of Phylloxera, for example, the arrival of new technologies and techniques in winemaking, and notes on the leading export markets of the day. It makes for fascinating, and often moving, reading.

‘I have worked in digital all my life, and didn’t know that I would feel such strong emotions when seeing these old books,’ says Zittoun. ‘The oldest editions are annotated by members of the Féret family, and bring to life just how much love and work was involved in each one. It is that feeling that we want to recapture’.