The owner of Château d’Esclans is Sacha Lichine, a French of Russian origin, son of a famous person from Bordeaux, Aléxis Lichine, who immigrated to France during the revolution of 17, when he was four years old. Li Alèxis began working in the wine trade, starting a négoce business, but after a few years he moved to America. In Provence, he became Major in the US Army and aide-de-camp to General Eisenhower, the future President of the United States.

After the war he returned to France for good and his passion pushed him back to the world of wine, in which he had acquired considerable expertise. With the help of a group of American investors passionate about wine, in 1951, he became the owner of a historic Château de Margaux, Château Prieuré-Cantenac. A property that falls under the famous classification of 1855, as quatrième grand cru classé, but nevertheless remains linked to its first Château, which it repeats with its name, Château Prieuré-Lichine.

The history of that property is absolutely noteworthy. It is said that around the year one thousand, the lords of Blanquefort donated these lands to a group of canons of St. Augustine, who settled in the Abbey of Vertheil. During the English domination in Gascony, which lasted 300 years, the abbey was an important stop for Santiago de Compostela, it was one of the most important wine estates in the Médoc.

The wine produced there was very prestigious, and in the mid-1400s its price was equal to that of Hermitage and Clos de Vougeot. At the beginning of the 1700s, Prieuré-Cantenac was entirely consecrated to the vineyard and miraculously managed to pass unscathed even after the Revolution, remaining the property of the religious, but to the first empire, it was sold to a burgher from Bordeaux.

Sacha was born in Bordeaux and studied in America, but he started working during the summer months as early as he was 23, organizing luxurious wine tours in the French vineyards here. Then he also started a négoce business, offering selections of wines from Burgundy and the Rhone. In the summer of 1989 Alèxis passed away and Sacha took over from his father, he was 27 years old.

In 1990 he opens a new company called Borvin, and distributes high quality Bordeaux wines.

But the real turning point comes after about nine years, when he sells some of the Margaux properties, and buys Château d’Esclans for three million euros. About 267 hectares, of which 44 are vineyards, mainly Grenache, then Rolle (our Vermentino), Cinsault, Merlot, Mourvèdre, Syrah and Tibouren (local name of the Ligurian Rossese).

A Swedish pension fund was the owner of Esclans, which only produced a small amount of wine on its own and sold the remaining grapes. But until the 1200s it was owned by Gérard de Villeneuve, a lord of Marseille, who practically owned the entire Esclans Valley.

Lichine senses the rise in demand for quality rosé wines, at a precise moment when everyone was saying that the market was saturated. He has created in a few years an unprecedented brand in the production of world-class rosé wines. His motto is enlightening: Life should be easy to drink.