Château Margaux case

EM Lyon Business School MK 103 – Brand Management Mr. Lionel SITZ

Jean-Christophe ABELA Isabelle ALIX Louis-Martin DUFAY Amélie SCHRAMM Alexandra WECHSLER

I. Presentation of the firm and the wine market
Château Margaux is a wine estate located in the South-Western part of France, close to Bordeaux, and producing two different red wines (Château Margaux and Pavillon Rouge du Château Margaux) and a white wine (Pavillon Blanc du Château Margaux). Eighty carefully chosen hectares are dedicated to vineyards for the red wines, 12 other hectares to vineyards for the white wine. Being one of the first wines to achieve the 1st growth status, Château Margaux wine immediately took part in the Bordeaux 1855 classification, elaborated by Napoleon and listing the five best Bordeaux wines. Château Margaux has always been and still remains a very famous wine all over the world thanks to its high quality and its seductive taste. A perfect mix of different elements is used in the production of Château Margaux wine to make such a perfection possible: a good climate, a “grand terroir” (great soil), the right grape variety, a high-quality human work. Since 1977, Château Margaux belongs to the Greek family Mentzelopoulos. Quite rejected at the beginning because of his nationality, André Mentzelopoulos directly tried to restore the declining estate to a level worthy of its history and reputation. And he made it! Only 3 years later, when he died, his daughter Christine took the lead of the estate and never stopped her efforts to maintain the brand image among consumers. In 1983, she even hired M. Pontallier as Young General Manager to help her succeed. Today 74 persons work for Château Margaux. The estate produces no less than 150,000 bottles of its first growth wine a year, 200,000 Pavillon Rouge and 33,000 Pavillon Blanc. Château Margaux is a reference in the wine industry and it perfectly matches people perception of French luxury. However, a part of the