“We are back.” Nicolas Audebert is announcing the return to prominence of two historic vineyards in the Bordeaux heartland of French winemaking—Château Rauzan-Ségla and Château Canon—both of which he has managed since 2014. “Of course, we have plenty of work to do,” Audebert says, “and every year will be a new challenge. But we are back.”
Audebert’s declaration marks an anniversary that links these distinctive and characterful winemaking concerns. Rauzan-Ségla is a 364-year-old vineyard in the Margaux appellation (or region), on the left bank of the Gironde estuary, to the north of the city of Bordeaux. Canon, a vineyard formed in 1760 from an established estate, is part of the Saint-Émilion appellation east of the city and on the river’s right bank. In 1994 and 1996, respectively, the luxury, fashion and fragrance house Chanel acquired both—an additional asset for its upscale portfolio.
Three decades at least were required, Audebert says, to bring these grand old vineyards to their best: one to understand, one to restructure, one to make precise plans and open the curtain on the future, as he puts it. “Chanel has given us the time to do it all properly, to be who we want to be, not going in a rush, not pushing too much. This is the perfect moment,” he says, “to celebrate two labels that are now considered among the best wines of Bordeaux—as they were in the past.”
Château Rauzan-Ségla, in the Margaux appellation in the Bordeaux region. Its vineyards are made up of a mosaic of parcels of land, the vines growing in deep gravel above an expansive limestone terrace, with multiple variations in soil make-up and grape type Photograph: Erea Azurmendi and Federico Reparaz
Reviving these classic wines, while maintaining their individual traditions, has brought their levels of execution, according to Audebert, up to those of Chanel, a house known for exacting standards of craftsmanship, savoir faire, and tradition mixed with research and development. It also allows the winemaker to reference a favourite dictum—“La mode se démode; le style jamais” (fashion goes out of fashion; style, never)—of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, the legendary designer and founder of the marque whose partners, the Wertheimer family, own it to this day.
Two wines, one culture
The late 17th-century château at Rauzan-Ségla, its farm and outbuildings are ranged along a road into the village of Margaux. With their lateral disposition they appear to embrace the land, or terroir: seams of gravel, sand and limestone clay sitting on a series of strata, or terraces, each supporting a varied depth and composition of soil. This core geology means that the Rauzan-Ségla vines—mostly cabernet sauvignon and merlot grapes, with cabernet franc and petit verdot raised in much smaller volumes to work as a final “spice”—sit in well-drained soil that causes them to send deep roots down towards the bedrock. This generates special flavours—varied by terrace, and by individual parcel of vines—in the mature grapes.
Rauzan-Ségla is made up of numerous parcels, or lots, of vines—some large, some tiny—intermixed in a complex mosaic, with parcels owned by neighbouring estates. The constituent parts are broken into sometimes very small batches in the nurturing of the grapes, their picking and vinification, to make a final blend built on complexity.
Château Canon: the 18th-century house is set in rolling country with its walled vineyards reaching right up to the historic town of Saint-Émilion Photograph: Erea Azurmendi and Federico Reparaz
The white-stone 18th-century château at Canon sits in a fold of rolling country and looks out on rows of vines, with the great stone belltower of the town of Saint-Émilion on the horizon. These parcels are planted with merlot and cabernet franc vines in a mixed clay and limestone soil set on a great limestone plateau. With the consistency in terroir across the property, the batches of grapes taken at the vintage tend to be of consistent, homogeneous quality.
Audebert likens the difference between making wine at Rauzan-Ségla and at Canon to the difference between conducting an orchestra and performing on a solo instrument. Both carry the same value to serious music lovers but the former requires bringing multiple players together to create a shared harmony, while with the latter the harmonics are generated across one instrument.
From one bank to another
The left and right banks of the Gironde are often characterised as standing in clannish opposition to each other—much in the manner of the Left Bank and Right Bank of the Seine in Paris—but Audebert sees them as joined by the river; two vineyards united by a single culture of making wine “sincerely and honestly” while showing a humility in the face of time and nature. The team across both vineyards focuses on research and development, but “by staying humble”, François Baudoux, the technical director at Rauzan-Ségla, says, “we learn something new every day”.
Château Rauzan-Ségla and Château Canon are on opposite banks of the Gironde estuary. The general manager of both vineyards, Nicolas Audebert, sees them as being joined by the river, in a single culture of making wine “sincerely and honestly" Map: The Art Newspaper based on cartography by Lozz/Adobe Stock
That connection across the Gironde is caught in the book From One Bank to Another (2020), a handsome photo essay where the first half, on Rauzan-Ségla, counts down from page 92 to one—ending on the centrefold of a haunting wide angle shot of the rich growth of reed beds and hedge that lines the Gironde—and then, for the second section, on Canon, running upwards from pages one to 92. This conceptual play on numbers is all at one with a trade and an industry where time, numerology and chronology are central to past, present and future.
The bridging role of the river is also clear to visitors who take a boat journey from where Rauzan-Ségla borders the Gironde—close to where that river is formed by the merging of the Dordogne and the Garonne—upriver to the centre of Bordeaux before completing the route to Saint-Émilion by road. The journey brings dramatically home Bordeaux’s role in the periodic booms in the region’s wine exports—with the sight of oceangoing cargo ships anchored not far from the city centre after navigating one of Europe’s largest estuaries.
At the time of the Roman empire occupying forces on the Gironde sent wine to succour their garrison in England. In the early 13th century the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, heiress of the duchy encompassing Bordeaux and the rest of the Languedoc region was queen first of France and then of England (the English term claret, for Bordeaux wines, is a reminder of the light-coloured “clairet” wines from the region favoured in London in the Middle Ages).
The Dutch, at the height of their trading empire in the 17th and 18th centuries brought expertise in drainage to improving the quality of the vineyards and cash to export Bordeaux wines. Then, in the mid-19th century the governing class of the UK, enriched by empire and the industrial revolution, developed a powerful taste for Bordeaux wines and exports rose dramatically to what was then the richest country on the planet.
Château Rauzan-Ségla has been owned by Chanel since 1994 and Château Canon since 1996 Photograph: Erea Azurmendi and Federico Reparaz
The importance of time in winemaking
Audebert is one of the most admired winemakers of his generation. He is a technologist with an eye for precision; a farmer in tune with climate and ecologies across the globe; a fluent, thoughtful raconteur; a clear-eyed decision-maker; and an enthusiast who takes pleasure in his work. Before assuming his post in Bordeaux, the Provence-born Audebert had qualified as an agricultural engineer and trained at Krug, one of the great champagne houses. He then joined Cheval des Andes—a collaboration between Château Cheval Blanc in Bordeaux and Terrazas de los Andes, in Mendoza, Argentina—as a winemaker and oenologist.
Now he is the general manager of Rauzan-Ségla, Canon and two more recent acquisitions by the house of Chanel: Château Berliquet, another historic Saint-Émilion vineyard bordering Château Canon, acquired in 2017—and Domaine de l’Ile, acquired in 2019, on the magical island of Porquerolles midway between Marseille and St Tropez, which produces delicious white and rosé wines.
Time is everything in winemaking, Audebert says. “It is everywhere in our job: in the vineyard management; in the way we make the wine; in the time we give to the wine; in our own interpretation, which changes over the years.” He and his team members draw on metaphors from the breeding of racehorses and the education and parenting of teenagers to describe the long timescale and detailed timekeeping that goes into their craft.
The grapes at Château Rauzan-Ségla and Château Canon are picked and sorted by hand Photograph: Erea Azurmendi and Federico Reparaz
It starts with choosing the right moment to pick the grapes by hand, separating them into multiple batches, with each batch processed in one day. It finishes, after the critical process of blending the wine from different batches, with the wine in barrels, later bottles, ageing in the cellars. Finally, there is the winemaker’s sampling from the bottle, over time, to gauge the development of a vintage as it breathes in the glass (and sometimes a carafe) in the course of a meal eaten at a tempo appropriate to a fine wine.
A mixture of farming, gardening and art
Both Rauzan-Ségla and Canon have been certified organic since 2024. A concern with sustaining the wider local ecology is apparent at all the vineyards under Audebert’s care. Farms, vineyards and gardens feel as one. The flower borders are created along horticultural lines, visually delightful but planned to encourage a diversity of species, and to preserve indigenous varieties at a time of climate emergency.
It is notable that when either Baudoux, at Rauzan-Ségla, or Audebert show visitors the vineyards, they use not just words and gestures to make their point but also demonstrative contact: with the soil, with clay, pebbles or fossils; with a vine’s trunk, leaves and fruit; or with fragrant plants, including lavender and fennel, in a naturally planned border of Mediterranean varieties that runs into the main parcels of vines at Berliquet. These tactile interactions are a reminder that winemaking is a mix of farming and gardening, of art, craft and science, all of it dependent on physical interaction with the terroir and its produce.
Winemaking as a mix of farming and gardening, of art, craft and science: both Château Rauzan-Ségla and Château Canon have been certified as organic vineyards since 2024 Photograph: Erea Azurmendi and Federico Reparaz
The team’s ecological approach is in line with a closely researched understanding of the soil, acquired through the use of cutting-edge technology, including ground radar, and an understanding of the growing published research into the contact between plants and trees at subterranean fungal, mycelial levels.
That philosophy is made tangible in the honey from Rauzan-Ségla’s bee hives. The taste is subtle and lasting on the tongue, with an unforced, unsweetened voice. It feels in harmony with the subtle, ever-expanding and long-lasting finish on the tongue of a 2009 or 2015 Château Rauzan-Ségla served to the château’s guests with fillet of Simmental beef from the chef Jean-Baptiste Depons’s kitchen.
A concern with precision
Everything done by Audebert and his teams at Rauzan-Ségla and Canon, and no less at Berliquet and Porquerolles—in the vineyard, the garden, the kitchen, the cellar—speaks of a seriously dedicated joy: a delight in shared savoir faire; a focus on precision, on working hand in hand with nature; in tasting multiple wines side by side and for the pleasure of guests; of serving food that does honour to the wines and the process of a meal built around produce from the day’s morning market; on hitting a true note.
A delight in shared savoir faire: the processes of blending and tasting are crucial parts of the work done by the winemaking team at both châteaux Photograph: Erea Azurmendi
This focus represents a detailed confidence in mission, a concern with precision, that calls to mind a famous verbal sally from the 17th-century French master Nicolas Poussin. When asked how he reached such standards of execution in his paintings, he answered, with Coco Chanel-like directness: “Je n’ai rien negligé.” He had neglected nothing in producing his art.
It feels like no accident that one of the great works produced by the precisely-minded Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time (around 1634-36)—commissioned in Rome by Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi (the future Pope Clement IX) and now in the Wallace Collection in London—features Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. Bacchus, representing autumn, the season of wine harvests, is one of four figures symbolising the seasons, as they dance hand in hand, but back to back, to the pipes played by the God of time.
The iconography of this canvas—said to have been dictated by Rospigliosi—has been much debated. But the boldly outward-facing stance of the dancers, catching a declining sunlight against a backdrop of dark rain clouds, has an elemental quality, as they connect, through their barefooted festive “bacchanal”, to the earth, to the terroir. They are holding a line, the line of a dance, confronted at once by time and nature.
How do the dancers hold the line? Nicolas Poussin's celebrated canvas A Dance to the Music of Time (around 1634-36) features Bacchus, the God of wine, and is emblematic of the precision that distinguishes the work of the French artist and that of the modern winemaker Wallace Collection, London. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
How do the dancers hold the line? That is the challenge for Audebert and his colleagues in the years to come. How to hold the line in gradually evolving the vineyards in their care, faced with the pressing timetable of climate change, without losing the essential character of the wines in their care.
Wine in an age of climate change
Audebert and his team have learned from sharing savoir faire with other businesses owned by, or associated with, Chanel; notably through the house’s 40-year alliance with a grower of fragrance blooms in Grasse, where the engagement with terroir, the elements and time—of picking roses, say, at exactly the right moment, when they are open, but not too open, of steeping ingredients in alcohol, and managing the development of a maturing liquid—has so much in common with the challenges of winemaking.
Audebert and his team have also learned from the diverse geography and local knowledge of the global wine trade. France, Italy and Spain have long since ceased to be the sole engines of authority and innovation, and a half-century boom in New World wines—especially those in Australia, California and Argentina—has created experience of winemaking in climate extremes that is there to be shared.
As it happened, Audebert’s first vintage in Bordeaux, in September 2015, followed a summer of record high temperatures in the region, closer to those that he was accustomed to in his work in Argentina. He adapted that experience to the 2015 vintage and vinification. The following spring, the wine critics lauded the Château Canon 2015, awarding it several top scores. It was hailed as the wine of the vintage.
The Château Canon vineyards back on to the ancient town of Saint-Émilion Photograph: Erea Azurmendi and Federico Reparaz
Ten years on, Audebert and members of his team—Axelle Araud, the wine development director; Géraldine Léger, the image director; and Marie Damoiseau, the press and public relations manager—are trying that award-winning 2015 Canon, over a lunch prepared by the chef Julien Peurichard. They are sitting under an ancient bay tree in the Parcelle du Bourg (the town lot). A magical adjunct to Château Canon, it is a courtyard home to a few hundred vines, grown and harvested in the heart of the town of Saint-Émilion. Audebert finds that the wine—which is always developing in the bottle—has lost some of its adolescent over-confidence, still present two years before, and that it is moving towards adulthood.
That special 2015 vintage, and those that have followed—where climate change becomes an ever more pressing feature of daily life and Bordeaux suffered more than one heatwave that topped 40C in the summer of 2025—are lessons for the future in an industry where winemakers are increasingly faced with a changing climate and an evolving ecology. The challenge for the future, Audebert says, is to hold the line, to continue to evolve the wines—at Rauzan-Ségla, Canon, Berliquet and Domaine de l’Ile—gradually.
His team’s main aim, Audebert says, is the “real expression of the product” rather than putting their personal mark on it. Whatever their winemaking backgrounds, they must “feel” the wine. Canon 2015 came from the first year they all worked together. He likes it, but if he and his team were to make it again now they would do it differently, with ten years’ experience of the property.
“Time, again,” he says. Making wine is all about time.
