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Virginie and Daniel Le Brun
Virginie Le Brun says home base is the greatest strength of her family’s winery, particularly in tough times.
No. 1 Family Estate, a méthode traditionnelle specialist established by her parents Daniel and Adele Le Brun 28 years ago, sells 98% of its wines in New Zealand.
“We’re always at the mercy of the market, wherever we are,” says the company’s sales director. “But when it’s the market we live in, we can help our reps and customers because we’re here at the heart of it.”
Export plays a supporting role, “but for us, this market is quite specific to our size and to our focus”.
Virginie was four months old when her parents moved to Marlborough in 1980, bringing their Champagne heritage to a nascent wine industry.
She grew up with an entrepreneurial streak, including selling green pinecones to Japanese tourists visiting her parents’ winery in buses.
“Why on earth they would want to buy them is beyond me now, but they did and I couldn’t help myself from wanting to engage with visitors.”
As a teenager, she worked at the winery, and later moved to Auckland to be a television presenter, before heading to London in 2013, where she was a parttime brand ambassador for No.1, while also working for a company that’s now their distributor in the United Kingdom.
“I went from the pushy little kid selling the pinecones to working for a company that I managed to persuade to become our distributor. I learnt so much from them.”
On her return to New Zealand in 2017, Virginie worked full time selling No. 1 wines in Auckland, “very lucky” not to be juggling multiple brands, “because it enabled me to focus on my customers and sales happened around it”.
In the current challenging environment, sales may be slow, but sparkling wine benefits from longer lees ageing.
“It’s one of the advantages of specialising in a style that rewards time. We are lucky that we’re not trying to sell multiple brands and high volumes. We’ve got a market and while the middle is thinning, we’re conscious of retaining high quality and calibrating product to demand.”
Not that it’s all sparkling wine and roses.
Virginie says the tough conditions of global wine sales, shaped post-Covid, are exacerbated by rising living costs and younger generations exploring alternatives to wine.
The challenge, she believes, is engaging Gen Z with authenticity.
“Rather than telling them wine is intimidating and trying to simplify it, we need to be relevant in a world of information overload. That’s where authentic engagement matters.”
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