Wall Street Journal’s Lettie Teague says CTV is a Great Gift

Alex Gambal arrived in Burgundy in the early 1990s, and in just four years he was making his own wines in one of France’s most fabled and insular regions. Gambal did much more than simply purchase a vineyard. He changed his whole life. 

When he first arrived in Burgundy with his then-wife, Nancy, and their two young children, Gambal had no practical knowledge of winemaking or the wine business and didn’t speak French particularly well. He did, however, have the good fortune to be taken under the wing of the late, great wine broker Becky Wasserman, who introduced Gambal to just about every important Burgundy vigneron. 

His education in the decidedly unglamorous and definitely uncertain wine business provides the meat of this memoir, published in September. It’s a sobering read. In Burgundy, the weather holds the upper hand. (Think frost, hail, rain.) Add to that the occasional unscrupulous supplier who tries to sell basic Bourgogne juice as Meursault—which, Gambal notes, was happily rare in his experience.

The business side of making and selling wines from Burgundy—a region now synonymous with billionaire investors and five-figure wines—is where Gambal’s book truly excels. He’s happy to share specific numbers. For example, in 2010 he was offered a deal in which he could buy a Burgundy domaine that included “three of the best parcels of Batard-Montrachet, some fantastic Puligny-Montrachet and a bit of Chassagne-Montrachet” (great white Burgundy vineyards), for a price that reached almost 13 million euros.

Gambal meticulously lists everything that was included in the deal, from wine to houses to leased parcels. “Perhaps a better way to sum up this kind of transaction, in fact most transactions in Burgundy, is that the seller is trying to sell everything including Granny’s house and sometimes even with Granny in it,” he writes. 

Gambal did not have 13 million euros to spend—not even close. He recalls thinking upon waking in the middle of the night in utter panic, “I do not have any of it, I have not even begun to put an investment package together, how am I going to get this done?” Did Gambal end up with Granny’s house? Burgundy fans—indeed, anyone interested in wine or the wine business or both—will want to read the book to find out. 

Email Lettie at wine@wsj.com.