The incredible May-Eliane de Lencquesaing

‘It’s curious to live two lives – one as if you are eternal, one knowing it might be finished tomorrow’.

There’s nothing morbid about hearing the 99 year old May-Eliane de Lencquesaing saying this. In fact it sums up rather perfectly her astonishingly perceptive and enquiring personality. Vibrant, memory like an elephant, perfectly put together, the lunch we shared just before Christmas 2023 (pheasant, cheese and chocolate cake) was one of the highlights of the year. A few weeks later, she was due to hop on a plane to head to her South African estate Glennelly, where she was spending several months, as she always does at this time of year.

And yes, 99 years old. Born May 17, 1925, the same year that Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby. She celebrates her 100th birthday in May 2025.

Today she is not just lively and engaged – but busy, and valued, on the board of the Bordeaux Academy of Science (officially known as the Academie des Sciences, Belles Lettres et Arts de Bordeaux, into which she was inducted aged 82). If that’s not enough, she’s author of several books, including the excellent Les Vendanges d’un Destin, her biography published in 2022, philanthropist, and owner of Glenelly in Stellenbosch – an estate that she bought in 2003 (aged 78) after selling Château Pichon Comtesse de Lalande in Pauillac. Oh, and we can throw in the Légion d’Honneur that she received in 1996, and the promotion to Grand Officier de Légion d’Honneur in 2011.

‘I have always lived to be creative,’ she says, ‘worked day and night, I stop when I stop’.

This is a woman who has lived many chapters, and who life traces the history not just of Bordeaux, but of France and French influence overseas for much of the 20th century – and into the 21st.

Most wine lovers know her for Pichon Comtesse, where she ruled with a rod of iron for almost 30 years. Known as La Générale (simply Madame or Lady May today at Glenelly), she took over the château aged 55, already a grandmother, having gone back to school to study oenology under Emile Peynaud, and read everything she could by Michael Broadbent, in English, noting down the technical terms that she knew she’d need because, she says brightly, why would anyone take over a wine estate without knowing how to make the stuff?

She took to it like water, travelling abroad to promote Pichon – and Bordeaux in general. She travelled, for example, 112,600km in 1995, and 138,800km in 1997. Her success led to her being named President of the International Wine And Spirits (IWSC) Competition in 1993 and Decanter magazine’s Woman of the Year in 1994.

It was her father Edouard Miailhe who first bought Pichon Comtesse into their family, together with her uncle Louis Miailhe. The pair of them were extremely close, and together at one point were running Siran, Palmer, Citran, Beaucaillou, Pichon Comtesse and Coufran, as well as the brokerage firm at 42 cours de la Martinique and cours du Verdun in downtown Bordeaux. The family’s Bordeaux interests were supplemented by holdings in land and shipping in the Philippines, where some of their ancestors settled in the 19th century, and that continue today.

‘The pair of them were like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’, she says, ‘My father tall and slim, my uncle barrel-shaped, and full of joy’. Their father Frederic would go every day into the office to see his sons working, enjoying listening to their discussions.

It turns out that Frederic Miailhe was perhaps the greatest influence on the young May-Eliane. ‘I was sent to St Jean de Luz with my grandparents when I was ten years old, because issues with my back meant I couldn’t always attend school. My grandfather was blonde and blue-eyed, with Swedish roots, and was a hugely gentle and intellectual man, with a great interest in science and literature. He taught me Latin and French – and piano from the age of four. He was a geologist at heart, and had a great love of soils and terroir, that he passed on to me even without my realising it’.

Her grandparents on her mother’s side were the Burkes – an Irish name that you come across regularly in the 18th century history of Bordeaux négociants, but their move to châteaux owners began in 1859 with the Miailhes at Château Siran in Margaux. Pichon Comtesse was purchased in 1925, and Palmer in 1938 (until 1980). It was at Siran where May-Eliane spent much of her childhood, and where the whole family lived during World War II – because, she says, Pichon and Palmer had vines and continued to produce wine, whereas Siran was a polyculture farm, with cows, chickens and a vegetable garden, ‘much more useful during those years’.

She left Bordeaux at a young age, after marrying Hervé de Lencquesaing, an army officer who became General de Lencquaisang, aged 21 (he had his own fascinating life, part of the D-Day landings on Utah Beach, and joining Patten at the Eagle’s Nest just after the German surrender, later teaching military strategy at Fort Worth in Texas). They had four children together, but her restless intelligence clearly wanted more than full-time motherhood. Any time she was free between babies or overseas postings with Hervé, she returned to studying – Italian, art history, geography, economics, politics, whatever took her fancy. ‘And then along came another child, and I would stop for a while’.

The decision to return to her childhood city, and take over the family estate was also not a given. At the time, she was director of a hospital and active in local politics up in northern France where the family was living. Her father had died in 1959, but the final division of his estate didn’t happen until 1978 due to the extremely complicated number of entities across France and the Philippines that were involved, and family disputes over how they should be split. Eventually May-Eliane inherited the family share of Pichon-Lalande by drawing lots with her brother and sister (acquiring 55 per cent at first, and subsequently buying the rest).

Thiry years later, in 2006, parting with it must have been hard – and certainly the sale to Roederer Estates when she had four children to potentially take over attracted some eyebrow raising at the time. But she was nearly 80 by this point, and had known the pain of family arguments over the division of property that had taken 20 years to resolve after the death of her father, and her children were already fully grown and engaged in other careers. Instead, she once again proved her extraordinary ability to throw herself into whatever is in front of her, this time choosing to buy an estate in South Africa. ‘I had noted that the IWSC competition’s Best World Cabernet Blend kept being won by South Africa, and I wanted to understand why. When I got there, I just fell in love’.

Today she divides her time between Bordeaux and South Africa, and is clearly close to her family. Her uncle Louis would take all the family away every year after the death of her father – his beloved wife had died two weeks after his brother, and he changed his life from then on, focusing entirely on family. May-Eliane clearly took inspiration here also, as she takes all of her grandchildren, from the age of 12 onwards, away on holiday each year. Destinations so far have included St Petersburg, Venice, Egypt… this is a grandmother we all wish we could have.

‘In the story of a life,’ she says, ‘you need to know how to turn the page’.