Behind each wine there is a man… or a woman! Corinne Chevrier Loriaud might never have become a winegrower. Now, she cannot imagine doing anything else with her life than running Château Bel-Air la Royère.

A return to her roots

Corinne Chevrier Loriaud has happy memories of wine from her childhood, hardly surprising for a winegrower’s daughter (from the Cognac region in Charente). “I can remember Sunday lunches with chicken and chips and a bottle of Bordeaux on the table. I had my first taste of wine when I was 10, with the family.” However, Corinne did not seem destined to work in wine. She had embarked on a quite different career path, going to business school and then working as a teacher in an agricultural college. “I wanted to be a mother and have lots of children. I never thought I’d become a winegrower.” But through the vicissitudes of life, she found herself the owner of an estate in the Bordeaux region, near Blaye. Although as a child she “only saw the difficulties of the job, it was always negative”, she ended up by discovering its attractions.

An ever-present feminine touch

She soon found her feet in the winegrowing world, predominantly male but where women have always had a place. “Women have been working in vineyards for a very long time. There are a lot of couples in winegrowing, and although it’s usually the men who are in the spotlight, the women work just as hard.” They often run the administrative side of the business and take care of sales, an aspect of the job which suits Corinne down to the ground, especially with her business school background. A woman first and foremost, she expresses her feminine touch in the winery and trusts her personal taste in order to make a pleasing wine “because it’s easier to sell something you like yourself.”

Corinne Chevrier Loriaud readily acknowledges the difficulties of the job, with its quiet periods (“I practically hibernate in winter”) and its anxious times (“from spring to harvest”), but she cannot imagine herself doing anything else. And it hasn’t stopped her from being the mother of four children, as she had hoped, proof that the challenges inherent in winegrowing do not prevent women from expressing their feminine side.

Find Corinne in a video (below) and on Blaye Friday with a special recipe !