The best French wineGlory to the built in 1525In the year, the castle of Haut-Brion was brought not by walls and towers, but by vineyards. The legendary castle wine "Chateau HautBrion" has been one of the five great Bordeaux wines of Premier Cru Classe for 150 years. If you dig into history, it turns out that wine was already being produced in Haut-Brion back when the places of its current rivals (Chateau Margaux, Lafite, Latour and Mouton) were still wastelands where goats roamed. Having decided to buy a castle in France, Prince Robert's great-grandfather, banker Clarence Dillon, stopped at Haut-Brion for more than just his love of wine. Hunting in those parts and the opportunity to ride horses must have attracted Mr. Dillon no less. The castle itself was in a rather deplorable state, which was absolutely not the case with the vineyards. The deal was concluded in 1935, and since then the Dillon family, although they did not live there permanently, invested enough money and effort in maintaining the Chateau Haut-Brion brand at the highest level. In 1982, the neighboring castle La Mission HautBrion also came into its ownership. Wine and vineyards surrounded Prince Robert practically from the very birth - as a little boy, he often lived in Haut-Brion with his sister, Princess Charlotte. But he did not intend to make a living from winemaking. In 1997, when the prince's mother, the Duchess de Mouchy, née Joan Dillon, asked him to participate in the management of the company Domaine Clarence Dillon, Robert, together with his young American wife, was already quite successfully selling scripts to Hollywood. Family interests outweighed. It took him almost five years to understand how the wine business works - and take it completely into his own hands. "And I still don't understand anything about wine," he says, smiling slyly. "But I am surrounded by people who understand it better than anyone in the world; they can name every vine in the vineyard with their eyes closed." He is referring in particular to the company's chief winemaker, Jean-Philippe Delmas, a representative of the third generation of Delmas working in Haut-Brion. And his recently retired father, who managed to prevent the Luftwaffe pilots billeted in the castle from getting into the cellars with precious wine during the war. Charming, witty, brilliantly educated Prince Robert is a supporter of one world. He believes that the more the cultures of different countries intersect, the better for everyone. In his international family, they have always loved Russian pies and regularly cooked borscht. Robert himself loves sushi and goes to a Chinese restaurant with his family once a week.
