Georges Duboeuf, who has died aged 86, was one of the giants of the international wine industry. Born into a family with four centuries’ history of winemaking in Pouilly Fuissé in the south of Burgundy, Duboeuf launched his own brand, Les Vins Georges Duboeuf, in 1964.
From the outset he had bigger ambitions than his neighbours, most of whom were happy to sell their wine fairly cheaply in nearby Lyon and Paris. Duboeuf not only wanted it to be listed in Michelin-starred restaurants across France, but also overseas.
The key to achieving this lay in the tradition of releasing the latest vintage of beaujolais as nouveau – new – wine on the third Thursday in November each year, just a few weeks after the harvest. There are various versions of the history of the beaujolais nouveau race. According to one, it began as a competition to get the wine to the French capital, inspired by Duboeuf seeing a roughly painted sign on the window of a Paris bistro announcing that “le beaujolais nouveau est arrivé”.
There is no question that the race to rush the wine to London began in 1970 as a private challenge between Joseph Berkmann, Duboeuf’s British importer, and his friend Clement Freud, the chef and TV personality. This soon became enough of a media event to attract the participation of the racing driver Sir Stirling Moss, and even the RAF joined in, carrying bottles of nouveau in a Harrier jump jet. Other beaujolais producers participated in the race, but somehow it was Duboeuf who appeared in newspapers and television reports, personally seeing off the trucks as they left his cellars at midnight.
He was born in the village of Crêches-sur-Saône, the youngest of three children of Antonia (nee Berthilier) and Jean-Claude Duboeuf. Georges never knew his father, who died when he was two. The business was taken over by his uncle and his brother, Roger, and, in his teens, Georges was given the task of delivering bottles by bicycle to customers in neighbouring villages.
At the time, most of the region’s producers sold their grapes to cooperatives, or wine in bulk to local merchants, and there was little connection between the ones who, like the Duboeufs, produced white wine from chardonnay grapes and those who made red beaujolais from the local gamay grape.
Showing unusual entrepreneurial flair in a conservative wine region, Duboeuf began to bottle both styles of wine from other producers in the family cellar. Among his best customers were top-class local restaurants, and it was these relationships that helped him when, having bought out the other members of his family, he launched his eponymous brand.
One reason his wines attracted so much attention was the masterstroke of giving them instantly recognisable floral labels that ensured they stood out on the shelf. But Duboeuf’s understanding of the importance of distribution was also crucial to his success. His US importer Bill Deutsch cleverly capitalised on the fact that the release of the beaujolais nouveau coincided with Thanksgiving and he promoted the French wine as the natural accompaniment to the celebratory meal.
In the 1970s and 80s, for a new generation of British and American consumers, beaujolais was a perfect introduction to wine: soft, juicy and far easier to drink than tough, tannic traditional red wines such as bordeaux and chianti. And beaujolais was almost synonymous with Duboeuf – Georges became known as the “king” or the “pope” of beaujolais.
But if millions of bottles of simple, quaffable beaujolais nouveau helped Duboeuf’s business to grow, he was just as interested in the more serious wines of his region. He was not only a big supporter of village appellations such as Fleurie, Morgon, St Amour and Moulin à Vent, but also of individual vineyards in these villages that few of his competitors took seriously.
While helping to promote the names of these wines, he also – unusually for a merchant – gave credit to some of the grape growers from whom he bought his wine. Every year he held a competition for the best wine of the vintage, inviting the winning growers to a banquet at the nearby Michelin three-star restaurant, Paul Bocuse, and featuring their names on the labels of his reserve bottlings.
In everything he did, this quintessentially French wine producer learned from what he saw happening elsewhere. France was slow to introduce the kind of wine tourism that was developed in Napa Valley, California, but Duboeuf created Europe’s most successful wine theme park, by taking over the former railway station in Romanèche Thorins, the village in which his cellars are situated. Since it opened in 1993, more than two million people have passed through its turnstiles.
If people are now discovering the attractions of white wine produced from the viognier grape, this is partly thanks to Duboeuf’s decision to plant it in the Ardèche region at a time when it seemed to be at risk of extinction.
Today, wine drinkers take it for granted that delicious, easy-to-drink, cleverly branded wines are available from countries such as Australia and Chile, and from across Europe. It was Duboeuf and his eye-catching beaujolais that helped lay the foundations for their success.
Duboeuf is survived by his wife, Rolande (nee Dudet), his son Franck, who has run the business since 2018, and his daughter, Fabienne.
• Georges Duboeuf, wine producer, born 14 April 1933; died 4 January 2020
