A n elegant, soft-spoken gentleman farmer, Christian Moueix grew up in Bordeaux wine country surrounded by beautiful things—some of the world’s best wines but also art and books. His father, Jean-Pierre, a Bordeaux legend who died in 2003, first built his reputation as one of the region’s most savvy négociants then began buying up esteemed châteaus, including his crown jewel, Pétrus, in 1964. But Jean-Pierre was also a literary man and a passionate collector—he acquired his first Monet at 18, long before he amassed his wine fortune. “My father loved art, especially paintings. It was the main talk at the table. We very rarely discussed wine, but we discussed painting, poetry,” says Christian, 78, over lunch at his art-filled home facing the Dordogne river, next door to his childhood residence.
Christian and his wife Cherise, a former art dealer raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., have built a collection that now rivals his father’s priceless holdings, including works by Gerhard Richter, Thomas Struth and Jean Dubuffet. On the lawn of their Bordeaux home is a massive work by Richard Serra, three enormous steel structures each weighing 43 tons. The piece caused an uproar over the public funds spent on it when it was first shown at Bordeaux’s contemporary art museum in 1990. Christian agreed to buy it on installment—helping out the city in the process—after Serra said he’d change the name from the original “Threats of Hell” to the less severe “Hopes of Paradise” (both are lines from the same epic poem, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”). “Over a lot of good wine, he agreed to rename it,” says Christian. “And we were friends from then on.”
Over the past three decades, Christian and Cherise have also cultivated a fruitful relationship with Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, cofounders of the Basel-based firm Herzog & de Meuron. Their latest collective venture, completed last year, is the Moueixes’ striking Belair-Monange winery, which overlooks the town of Saint-Émilion from a plateau above the vineyards. The main concrete structure, in beige tones that mimic the local limestone soil, extends seamlessly from an adjoining 19th-century stone house that’s been reconstructed with soaring windows and a concrete roof. “The ‘Batiments de France’ were open-minded enough to allow those big windows,” Christian says of the French preservation authorities, during a tour of the project in late spring.
The main passage into the new winery building shares the form and dimensions of the central nave of the Monolithic Church of Saint-Émilion, which was carved into the hillside in the early 12th century; its bell tower is visible from the winery’s roof terrace. Herzog describes the cavernous entryway as “a kind of cathedral for workers and visitors, opening up on either side, opening views and also accesses to the different functions of the building.”
Inside are rough-textured concrete walls with a honeycomb structure reminiscent of the Alhambra in Spain. They feature the etched contours of a 16th-century Albrecht Dürer engraving, “Joachim and the Angel,” blown up so big it has become an abstraction. The archangel Gabriel pictured on the Belair-Monange label is a detail from this artwork. Upstairs in a lab space, the Moueixes have recently added a collection of Josef Albers screen prints. The couple entrusted a large reception room on the ground floor to Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who dangled paper lanterns from its ceilings, hung French newspapers emblazoned with text from Korean poet Yi Sang on its walls and installed an imposing wood table imported from Chiang Mai. Cherise asked Tiravanija to create a space where “people can come together, sit and chat.”
But the winery won’t have many visitors.
The Moueix family is as known for its discretion as for its restrained, low-intervention red wines. Christian, a viticulture trailblazer, introduced the “green harvesting” that helped send Pétrus into the stratosphere as one of the world’s most valuable wines: a crop-thinning technique now common at top wineries worldwide. Today he oversees eight Bordeaux wineries, none open to the public, and has exclusive distribution deals with more than a dozen others. Belair-Monange, which has welcomed a few wine industry guests in its first year, won’t be quite as impenetrable as Pétrus in nearby Pomerol, the family’s most famous and intensely private property, which Christian ran for 38 vintages before his older brother Jean-Francois took over in 2011.
Christian Moueix studied enology at the University of California, Davis, in the late 1960s, then returned home in 1970 to manage the family vineyards. At the time, Pétrus wasn’t quite the cult wine it’s become today. “It’s hard to believe, but in the 1970s it was difficult to sell Pétrus,” says Christian. “I would offer 50 cases, and people would buy 20.”
While expanding the family’s extensive holdings in Bordeaux, he also made frequent trips to California, looking for a foothold. “For me, going to California, it was kind of the Wild West,” he says. “I was happy to go back.” Robert Mondavi, a mentor of his, introduced him to the Napa property, originally part of the famed Inglenook estate, that would eventually become Dominus, the family’s first winery outside Bordeaux.
Christian had begun discussions with architect I.M. Pei about designing the Dominus winery by the time he met Cherise in Paris in the early 1990s, when she was running the Marian Goodman Gallery’s outpost by the Seine. “I tried to sell Christian some art, to no avail,” she says of their initial encounter.
After they married in 1994, Cherise became actively involved in the plans for Dominus. Instead of moving forward with Pei, who was completing work on the Louvre pyramid, she suggested considering more emerging talents. “I told Christian, ‘When you speak to Pei, you call him master. It is as if you’re speaking to your father. You have to pick an architect who’s your age, your generation,’” she says.
Cherise had been impressed by Herzog & de Meuron’s work, which she’d seen while attending Art Basel over the years. Christian reached out to the firm just before it won the commission to design the Tate Modern in London. “I said to Christian, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to be so busy and never want to work on our project,’” recalls Cherise. But Herzog, a Bordeaux wine lover, says he was thrilled at the prospect of working with one of his “heroes.”
The winery that Herzog & de Meuron went on to design for Dominus features a camouflaging facade of steel gabions filled with local basalt rocks. It is so understated it disappears into the landscape. “In the Napa Valley, where there’s so much obvious architecture, I said, ‘Jacques, please build a winery that’s invisible,’” says Christian. “‘I don’t want people to see it.’”
“It’s kind of a stealth building,” says Herzog. “In fact, it’s really big, a huge, simple volume.” The stone-filled cages also act as a temperature control mechanism. “Even with the climate of Napa we need air conditioning maybe 20 days a year,” says Christian.
Since Dominus opened in 1998, Christian and Cherise have worked with Herzog & de Meuron on five more projects—four of them complete, and none publicly accessible. The couple have become much more than just clients of the firm. “Our relationship with Jacques and Pierre, we really have become the closest friends, far from architecture and far from wine,” says Christian. “Though the fact they love wine helps, of course.”
The architects took on their next wine project for the Moueixes in 2002, transforming a former grange at Château La Fleur-Pétrus, a more low-key property next door to Pétrus, into the Réfectoire, a loft-like gathering space for grape pickers. Christian and Cherise host raucous harvest feasts there every autumn.
In 2008, Christian combined two properties in Saint-Émilion—the much-celebrated Château Magdelaine, purchased by his father in 1952, and its long-neglected neighbor, Château Belair—to create Belair-Monange. “My father always told me, ‘Mon petit, the best vineyard in Saint-Émilion, potentially, is Belair,’” says Christian.
After producing a few vintages with his son, Edouard, who lives on the property, Christian began drawing up plans for the new winery in 2015. Herzog & de Meuron considered several locations before selecting the plateau, coming up with the idea of attaching a new structure to a crumbling home there. “The building is a kind of hybrid, it has different components, like the wine has different components,” says Herzog. “Spatially, it’s a sequence, a real sequence of spaces you discover as you walk through. They reveal different characters or different aspects of that wine.”
Structural beams running the length of the winery create crenulated lines across the rooftop, mirroring the ancient Roman furrows found buried in fields across the property. There are plans to grow plants in those rooftop creases, to “add gravity, to add inertia, to improve the climatic energy consumption within the building,” says Herzog.
The family’s long-term ambitions for the grand cru wine produced at Belair-Monange since 2009 reflect the discreet grandeur of their new winery. Christian, who is happiest among his grapes—“I love to begin my day in the vineyard, there are no lies there, you are serene for your whole day,” he says—knows new vine plantings will need time to mature. “We are not in a hurry. The vines have to get older. I think the wine should reach its full potential in 20 years.
“If I am still here, I will be lucky. If not, my son will be lucky. It has the best terroir in Saint-Émilion, this is unquestionable,” Christian says. “If we don’t make one of the best wines of Saint-Émilion, we will be at fault.”
