Obituary Philippe Raoux: rewriting the rules of Margaux

Philippe Raoux,  who died on October 20 aged 70, was one of the first winemakers that I met when I moved to Bordeaux. As a journalist, he was somebody that you came across on a regular basis, because he was always doing something noteworthy. One of the first château owners in the region, for example, to incorporate modern artworks and art installations into his estate, beginning in 1992, and going so far as to install a glass roof and to lean a huge 8 tonne iron girder – known as La Diagonale and created by sculptor Bernard Venet – against the 17th century building itself.

Born into a family of wine merchants and grape growers with four generations in Algeria, Raoux returned to France aged 9 in 1962, following Algerian Independence. The family remained in wine, and Raoux bought Château d’Arsac in 1986. With a history dating back to the 12th century (it was reportedly a camp for English soldiers during the Hundred Years War), it was very close to abandon by the time of his purchase, with just 4ha of vines left, entirely in AOC Haut-Medoc, and largely used, as he himself remembered, as ‘an industrial chicken farm’.

Today it stands at 102ha, with almost 50ha in AOC Margaux, entirely the result of Raoux’s determination – and promoted to Cru Bourgeois Exceptionnel in 2020. Even more remarkably, the vines surround the château in a single stretch, extremely unusual for a property of this size, and a good indication of just how much this sector of the Haut-Médoc had been forgotten – in the 19th century, the Arsac estate covered a full 260ha.

He is perhaps best known for this fight to get his vines included in the Margaux appellation. At the time of the creation of Margaux in 1954, Arsac was seen to be outside of the area (there is some dispute as to whether it was entirely unplanted in the crucial year, or simply didn’t register the harvest). Raoux had proof however that back in the early 1900s its label stated Château d’Arsac-Margaux. Understanding the value of this, Raoux began a lobbying process to get his vines included in Margaux, drawing on references to the property in books from the 18th and 19th centuries.

He was refused, but hired a lawyer to contest the decision, using the boundaries linked to an 18th century map that showed d’Arsac within Margaux. The local wine syndicate countered that the black sands of Arsac were not good enough for the appellation. Following soil studies (and a trip to the supreme court, the Conseil d’Etat) 40 acres of the vineyard were initially found to be of high enough quality and the boundaries of Margaux redrawn to allow it. The rest remained AOC Haut- Médoc, with the case only finally settled in 2008. As I wrote in Inside Bordeaux, ‘Although it caused some bad feeling at the time, it did lead to a far clearer understanding of what type of terroir constitutes Margaux; so perhaps we can all be grateful to Raoux for that’.

This was far from his only achievement though. His incorporation of art installations into the estate has continued with new purchases every year, making it one of the most visited properties in the Médoc today, and has been expanded in recent years with the introduction of musical theatre, Si Arsac m’était chantait, retelling the story of the property.

His creativity was clear with his approach to wine also, with one of the most impressive in my mind The Winemakers Collection, where he asked a series of wine consultants to produce a wine from the same plot of AOC Haut-Médoc vines in successive vintages, giving it their own style. The roll call of consultants included Michel Rolland, Denis Dubourdieu, Andréa Franchetti, Stéphane Derenoncourt, Eric Boissenot, Zelma Long, Susana Balbo, Ntsiki Biyela, Dany Rolland and Alain Raynaud. It was classic Raoux, both highlighting and questioning the role of terroir and personality in wine.

Later, Raoux became one of the first Bordeaux producers to sell his winery to the Chinese, with the purchase of Château Viaud in 2011 by COFCO, the nationally-owned wine and spirits group. A few years later, in 2014, he sold his La Winery  project to the Lurton family. This vast wine store, concert hall and restaurant on the Route de Verdun in the Haut-Médoc had opened in 2007, and although it never achieved the level of success that it would have done in a more well-known location, was once again a sign of Raoux’s restless ambition, and determination to do things differently.

He is succeeded by his wife Céline Lis-Raoux, sons Pierre, Louis and Ulysse Raoux, and grandson Théodore.