He’s the man who manages mega insurance company Axa’s wine portfolio, responsible for Pichon-Longueville Baron, Quinta do Noval and Disznókö, the Tokaji property. ChristianSeely certainly has the pick of some the world’s top properties – but he still wants more. Interview by Rebecca Gibb
Bet you’ve heard the line “I wish I had your job” when you tell people you work in the wine trade. Meet Christian eely, managing director of some of the world’s most famous wine estates, and you’ll soon develop job envy too. Shame he’s only in his forties and doesn’t look like putting his feet up any time soon. In fact, he’s just done the Médoc marathon, runs around after two children under five (sorry, five-and-three-quarters, his son Theodore corrects
me) and jet-sets around AXA’s properties from Hungary in the east to Portugal in the west. Makes you tired just thinking about it.
Seely joined AXA Millésimes – the wine arm of the French insurance group – in 1993 as managing director of Port house Quinta do Noval AXA Millésimes. He was just 33, had no experience running a wine estate and spoke no Portuguese. If you were a betting man (as was his grandfather, a former racing correspondent for The
Times) he wouldn’t have been an odds-on favourite to succeed. But with a background in turning companies into
profitable businesses, his appointment seems to be paying the French company and its shareholders back favourably.
Noval was in a bit of a state when AXA bought it in 1993 and installed Seely at the helm in the Douro. Since then, 100ha have been replanted, mainly with Touriga Naçional, on its vertiginous schistous slopes. While rather pleased with the achievement, Seely is modest. “It was a wine-trade jewel that just needed polishing,” he says.
Seely moved to Bordeaux in 2001 when he was appointed managing director of the whole AXA wine portfolio, but Port had seeped into his blood stream during his seven-year residency at Noval: in 2004 he bought 76ha of bramble-ravaged vines two miles upstream. “I’d had my eye on it since I got here but AXA wasn’t interested so I got a group of 11 investors – including my mum – to buy it.” Quinta da Romaneira is a 400ha property with 76ha under vine. Seely explains he had to replant the property “pretty damn quick before they took away our planting rights”.
