Master Winemaker 100: Fabrice Bandiera

The technical director at Bordeaux’s Château des Laurets features in this year’s Master Winemaker 100 guide. He tells db about revelling in the unexpected, dispelling preconceptions about Bordeaux and the extreme region he’d relocate to if he couldn’t make wine.

A native of Bordeaux’s Entre-Deux-Mers region, Fabrice Bandiera comes from a family of winegrowers, and so discovered his vocation very early on. After completing his studies and gaining experience on the family estate, in 1992 he spent a year working for Jean-Michel Cazes, who at the time also oversaw the AXA Millésimes properties. Working at such prestigious estates as Châteaux Lynch-Bages and Pichon Baron instilled in Bandiera a strong sense of rigour and professionalism. In 1994, he was appointed technical director of a 45-hectare family estate in the Premières Côtes de Bordeaux, before joining the team at Château des Laurets in 1996. Here, for almost 30 years now, he has contributed to the success of the Edmond de Rothschild family estates.

A wise person once told me to be curious about everything, enrich yourself with all the experiences to better transmit your knowledge with humility.

A great wine should represent a family vision based on audacity, patience and the revelation of unexpected terroirs.

A great winemaker should be sincere, true and talk about his job with passion and simplicity.

Perfection is the vintage or bottle that expresses the character of the place, with respect for their raw material.

The thing I’d most like to change about the wine world is preconceived ideas.

I wish I could tell the consumer who drinks my wine that you shouldn’t hesitate. Just trust your instinct and your own taste. My wine is made to take pleasure in sharing.

The last time I asked a sommelier for advice, it was Pierre-Charles Gandilhon, head sommelier at one of our partners, the Bertrand Hospitality restaurant group in Paris. We talked about how consumers’ tastes are evolving and what a fine dining wine should embody today.

If I couldn’t be a winemaker, I would be a researcher at the North Pole.

I wish our vineyards to be resilient to all the challenges that come our way, to continue their logic of transmission, rather than efficiency.

My next ambition is to have the quality of our wines recognised, to propose a vision that will change preconceptions about Bordeaux wines.

If I won the lottery, I wouldn’t change anything about my life; winemaking is my passion.

If there were more hours in the day, it would leave more time to share my passion.

When it’s all going wrong, I open a bottle of Château des Laurets and invite a few friends over.

My desert island wine would be Château des Laurets Baron Sélection Parcellaire 2004 in magnum, for its quality and to remind me of the beautiful adventure that started in this vintage with Benjamin and Ariane de Rothschild.