About Me

I fell in love with Chinese language during a discovery class in my Burgundy high school and decided to go to Paris to keep studying it at university. It was not very popular back in the early 2000’, so my parents asked me « What for? ». During my studies I went to China for a one-year exchange program (in Chengdu) and fell in love with the country, my next goal was to find a way to go settle in China after graduating from my Master Degree. In 2011, I got the chance to reunite my 2 passions, China and wine, when I was offered to work for the French Aquitaine Region (whose capital is Bordeaux) based in its representative office in the French Consulate in Central China (Wuhan), that’s how I started working in the wine industry and have never left neither China or wine since! Afterwards I have moved on working for a Bordeaux wine merchant, a French wine producer with wineries in different regions in France and abroad, and finally for Rhône Valley wine producers. I love China and always felt it is where I belong so after so many years working for French companies, I worried that I was not doing enough for my adoptive country. When I learnt that my main client who was importing our Rhône Valley wines back then, who was also a winemaker trained in Bordeaux (Zhang Yanzhi), was founding an ambitious winery project in China, I decided to go join him and Xige Estate in Ningxia, China Northwest’s Up and Coming Wine Region. Again, all my friends and contacts from the wine industry, both abroad and in China, thought I was going mad leaving a comfortable life in an international Chinese city (Shenzhen) to go settle in an isolated area, working for a new winery, when nobody was giving any attention to Chinese fine wine yet. But for me Xige Estate project really felt like destiny. When Zhang Yanzhi, whom I have cooperated with for over 3 years dealing with French wines, offered me to work for him, I got very excited. I knew he was a great brand builder and wine distributor, someone not only with ambition and passion but also with a real vision, and I believed that if someone could change Chinese wine fate, he was THE one. And here I have been for the last 4 years, deeply rooted in Ningxia, and I absolutely can’t see myself do anything else, but keep on promoting Chinese fine wine around the world and be an active member of this great adventure. There is nothing more exciting than working for a new winery, in a new wine region and a « new » wine country, and see them grow in the World of wine, especially when the wines are that great and I can enjoy them every day !