Today he owns seven vineyards with friends, and his life is stitched into the fabric of the region. “I displayed my enthusiasm for the product, let’s put it that way,” says Chris. “He drank so much that the locals adopted him,” says his son, Alex. Initially there was all this resistance, but once they realised I was not some outside speculator hoping to make a killing, but rather more Chablisien than the Chablisiens, it was fine.” You had to pay your social security as an agricultural labourer. ![]() ![]() “I had to tick every box to be treated as a local. Bureaucracy, I am not the first person to note, is a French word. It took him eight years to satisfy the criteria of the local authorities so that he could plant his vines. ![]() (Chris and Jacqueline divorced in 1995, and Emma and Alex have long since acquired new siblings on both sides.)Ĭhris bought his first vineyard in 1991. And even though the family moved back to England when Alex was a toddler, Chris and the kids kept coming back to Chablis year after year. During their seven years in France, they had two children, Emma, born in 1990, and Alex, two years later. Back then, he was a young English barrister recently relocated to Paris with his then wife, Jacqueline, also a lawyer. He first came to Chablis in 1987, “to pick grapes and carry a hod up and down a hill”, as he puts it, sounding very much like a man who would like nothing more than to be doing exactly that right now. I wasn’t very happy, if I’m being honest. But Chris’s real passions are for game fishing, music and wine-making – and wine-drinking. As well as French, Watson speaks German, Spanish, Italian, and his Russian is good enough to decode complicated legal documents. And, in its way, a very modern one: the grape skins are organic and the gin is certified carbon-neutral.Ĭhris Watson, 65, is a high-flying City lawyer, a partner in a large international law firm, with a focus on communications law. Flavoured by the skins of grapes handpicked in the steepest, most prestigious grand cru vineyards of Chablis, it is, in Alex’s description, “quite an esoteric product”. “I like the rituals around it and the history and the connection with the people here” © Rich StapletonĪt least partly a tribute to Chris, and to the land – the terroir – that the Watsons love, Renais will go on sale for the first time today, initially in the UK. “What I really love is the culture here of the harvest,” says Emma. And, uniquely for a gin, it is as much French as it is English, just as the Watsons feel themselves to be. It’s called Renais, or “rebirth”, pronounced like “Renée”. More specifically, he loves rural Burgundy, in the eastern-central part of the country, and especially Chablis, the small Burgundian town famous for its white wine.īut the Watsons are in France, en famille, to toast a new venture: the launch of a gin, the brainchild of Alex Watson, Emma’s younger brother, who until recently was an executive in the drinks industry. ![]() “But I am a mega-nerd.” Chris Watson loves France, and the French. “I prefer to say I’m passionate,” Chris replies, taking the measure of a glass of local red. “He’s a mega-nerd,” says Emma over a long lunch last September, with a bias towards regional classics, at Bistrot des Grands Crus in Chablis. To call Emma Watson’s father an oenophile would be undercooking it. Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
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