Businesses – especially family-run businesses – are in many ways like relay races that can be won or lost according to how the baton is passed from one leader to the next or from an older generation to a younger one.
Some companies flounder or fail to grow because of inbred thinking – let’s continue doing things the way we always have – while others crash and burn because the newcomer fails to understand the basic bones or history of a business.
Finding the sweet spot between the two – a new perspective, yet one with some familiarity with the basic nuts and bolts – is almost always a difficult undertaking. Within the wine business, it’s this generational passing of the baton that we see often taking place.
Even daughters and sons who have decided in their teens to stay in the family wine business are often encouraged to attend enology schools and perhaps do post-graduate wine work in another country, often in the vineyards of far-away colleagues, to bring new thinking back to the family vineyard and cellar.
By the same token, young sons and daughters who swear they will never prune another vine or rack another barrel as adults often find their ways back home after a decade or so of successfully doing something else somewhere else. Sometimes they have rediscovered their love of the family terroir or are heeding the call of an elderly parent too strong to ignore.
Enter Anne Bousquet – literally.
I am having breakfast – no wine on the table, I’m afraid – with Domaine Bousquet’s CEO and co-owner, who has one foot in Europe and one in the Americas, and she arrives all fresh and smiling at the appointed hour for breakfast at La Grande Boucherie near the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Along with her husband, Labid Al Ameri, Bouchet decided a few years ago to help her French father make Argentine wine, and the two of them have subsequently grown the business that is today one of the most successful independent producers of organic wine for consumers in both the U.S. and Europe.
Not that had she plans to do any of that, she tells me, as we place our orders.
Bousquet – now in her late 40s – was born in the ancient city of Carcasonne where her family made wine in the surrounding Languedoc countryside. Bousquet would have been the fourth generation to grow grapes in the South of France, but, she says, “I never wanted to be a farmer.” Instead, she attended the University of Toulouse, graduating in 1995 with a degree in economics.
Neither had Bousquet planned to go to graduate school in America until she was offered the opportunity to enroll at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. The timing was perfect, as she had an additional motive to leave sunny France for the frigid American plains.
“I was trying to get away from a heavy boyfriend,” Bousquet relates with a grin. The boyfriend became history. And not only did Bousquet earn her master’s in applied economics, she also met her future husband, Labid Al Ameri, a Kuwaiti native by way of Spain.
Meanwhile, Bousquet’s father, winegrower Jean Bousquet, was having his own foreign adventures. A vacation in Argentina in 1990 led him to fall in love with the country. Although he didn’t speak Spanish, he made several return visits and in 1997, while his daughter was still doing graduate studies in Minnesota, Bousquet pere purchased 900 acres of virgin land in the Mendoza highlands near Tupungato in the Uco Valley and began planting grapes.
“Dad kept calling for Labad and me to come visit, but I wasn’t paying him too much attention,” she says, having her own career and marriage to attend to. By this time, she had moved to Boston after graduation, and for the next 10 years worked as an economist, much of it doing forecast analysis for the European paper packaging industry – about as far away from winegrowing as she could get.
“Dad had decided that he wanted to grow grapes organically, and it took him about three years to make the conversion, one of the first organic producers in Argentina,” Bousquet says. Finally, she paid a filial visit in 2001, about the same time her father was getting ready to produce his first vintage of Domaine Bousquet. The hook was set, but while she and her husband became interested in what the elder Bousquet was doing, his daughter was not yet ready to be reeled in. “My father said, ‘I have this production, all this wine. Now where do I sell it?’ He could make wine, but he didn’t know anything about marketing,’” she says, laughing.
While keeping her day job, Bousquet began to get involved in the marketing side of the business. “We were encouraged to go to the Miami Wine Fair in 2004, which we did, but we were innocents, not knowing what we should be doing,” she says, “The organizer liked our wine and decided to enter it into the competition for us.”
“We were at the awards dinner, not expecting anything, so I went to the bathroom.” Bousquet says. “When I returned, I looked around and there was my husband up on the stage accepting an award. We had won fifth place.” By the time Bousquet officially joined the company in 2008, the business had grown to a million dollars.
By 2014, Bousquet and her husband decided to import their own wine into the U.S. and to headquarter their American business in Miami, also where the Bouquet/Al Ameri family lives today when they aren’t in Argentina.
The first really big break, she says, came in Europe. “The Nordics saved us,” she says. “Sweden is one of those countries where the state controls the wine sales, and in 2020 they decided they needed 20% of their wine to be organic. We filed for our organic Chardonnay and then later for our Malbecs, and won the contract for each.”
Today, Domaine Bousquet produces 4 million liters a year and exports 95% of its volume to more than 50 countries, owning their own import companies in the USA, Europe, and Brazil. The company has a work force of around 180 employees, include Bousquet’s brother – the one who always wanted to be in the wine business.
Most of Domaine Bousquet’s wine sales today are still at entry level. Its basic Malbec – organic, as are all their wines – sells at around $11 a bottle, but there are plans to start addressing the premium market with a line of single-vineyard wines.
As we are finishing coffee and pastries, I ask Bousquet what made them wait until now to go super-premium, as most winegrowers want to launch an over-$100-a-bottle trophy wine as soon as the first vintage. “That’s because we were outsiders, not part of the wine industry, so we weren’t saying, ‘Oh, we have to make the best wine!’” Bousquet says. “We were saying, let the consumer decide” on price and positioning. Ownership ego didn’t enter the business equation.
“Up until now, we have grown organically,” she says, not intending the pun, “but we may eventually decide to take on a minority partner.” However, Anne and Labid have two daughters, the oldest now 17, and she is probably already thinking – as Mom was thinking three decades
earlier – whether she ever wants to be in the wine business as the fifth generation to make or to sell wine.
Meanwhile, what happened to Dad – the third generation Argentina winegrower from France? “He was only interested in growing grapes, so we bought him out several years ago,” Anne Bousquet says. Not that Jean Bousquet went back to France to retire nor strayed from his farming roots. In fact, he got even closer. “He still has his own vineyard near the winery and is one of our best suppliers of organic grapes.”