On 2 November 1987, Gérard Bertrand sat in his father's office chair for the first time.

Georges Bertrand had died in a car accident five days earlier. Gérard was 22, with a career in rugby, a family wine business and approximately 25 employees who now looked to him for answers.

Only the day before the accident, father and son had talked about the future. Rugby and wine. Georges had introduced him to both, and had his own ideas about where his son's life might lead.

Gérard had been harvesting grapes at Château de Villemajou since the age of ten. He also knew rugby pitches rather well. His father was a referee who had helped establish a club in their village, and Gérard had grown into a serious player.

Giving up either world was apparently out of the question.

For years, he divided his life between the two. Wine business during the week, rugby at weekends. He eventually captained Stade Français, which is not exactly the sort of recreational activity one squeezes in between checking invoices and visiting vineyards.

Bertrand kept playing until around thirty.

In an interview with La Revue du vin de France, he described his father as his hero. Years after Georges's death, he still wondered whether wine was genuinely his own choice or simply the future his father had imagined for him.

Whatever the answer, he had spent his twenties learning to manage two demanding careers at once. By the time rugby was behind him, he was already expanding the wine business beyond the family estate.

His next challenge would involve fewer tackles, but considerably more arguments.

The Boss Has Gone Mad

In 2002, Gérard Bertrand became interested in biodynamics.

He had encountered the approach through figures including Aubert de Villaine of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Then he turned to Rudolf Steiner's agricultural lectures, which are not particularly light reading.

Bertrand read them three times.

Even then, he later admitted, he hadn't understood everything.

Biodynamics draws on organic farming but adds preparations and agricultural practices influenced by lunar and planetary cycles. Its more esoteric principles remain scientifically disputed.

Bertrand began testing biodynamic cultivation on five hectares at Domaine de Cigalus in 2002. The following year, he decided to convert the rest of the vineyard, according to the company's published history.

His colleagues had good reasons to be cautious.

Changing agricultural methods meant retraining vineyard teams, accepting unfamiliar practices and risking yields. The first years were difficult. Production fell, mistakes were made, and the results did little to reassure the people responsible for keeping the vineyards productive.

Richard Planas, Bertrand's director of estates, had been trained in conventional agriculture. Bertrand described him as an exceptionally rational man.

In an interview with La Revue du vin de France, Bertrand recalled that during the first three years, people said the boss had gone mad.

He continued anyway.

From 2007, the company began extending biodynamic cultivation to its other estates. By 2024, according to its published figures, 930 hectares across 17 estates were farmed biodynamically, including 830 hectares certified by Demeter.

Bertrand credits biodynamics with improving vineyard vitality and giving his wines greater freshness. Those are his observations, not scientific proof of every principle behind the method.

He has also argued that modern winemaking can produce technically excellent wines that gradually lose their individuality.

He wants wines that retain something unmistakable about the places they come from.

It is an interesting ambition for a man building an international wine business: to become widely recognised without making everything recognisably the same.

And Bertrand's interest in individuality doesn't end with what goes into the bottle.

The Rose Underneath

Wine bottles are usually rather conservative objects.

They come in different shapes, colours and weights, but most of their visual ambition is concentrated in the label. Occasionally someone adds an elaborate capsule or an unusually heavy base, as though a few extra grams of glass might persuade us that the wine inside is more important.

Bertrand studied the international success of producers such as Robert Mondavi, Torres and Antinori. He understood the value of a recognisable name, especially for a region whose wines had not always enjoyed the prestige accorded to more famous parts of France.

His business expanded through acquisitions, including Château l'Hospitalet in 2002, and developed hospitality and wine tourism alongside its growing portfolio.

In 2010, a young designer named Mélitine Courvoisier entered the Verallia Design Awards with a concept called Soirée à Rosé.

Her idea was to combine two gifts in one: a bottle of wine and a bouquet of flowers.

She sculpted a rose into the base of a glass bottle. The flower was there all along, waiting to be discovered when someone lifted the bottle or turned it over.

Courvoisier won the competition.

Bertrand chose her design for Côte des Roses, which reached the market in 2013. The story of the bottle and its designer is documented by Verallia.

What I like most is that the rose isn't on the label. It's underneath, where nobody expects to find the most interesting part of the design.

The choice was commercially astute, too. In a crowded market for rosé, a sculpted flower gave Côte des Roses an instantly recognisable feature.

Bertrand continued exploring distinctive packaging. Marie Legallet created the square-based Clos du Temple bottle, with proportions inspired by the golden ratio. The Art de Vivre collection draws on the form and material of ancient Mediterranean amphorae.

Yet Courvoisier's rose has a particular charm.

She imagined something playful and delicate. Bertrand saw a place for it in a business he had spent decades building.

The former rugby captain, who had once refused to choose between sport and wine, had no difficulty choosing a rose.

Wine is never just wine. Sometimes the winning move is knowing which rose to pick.