May-Eliane de Lencquesaing

Coming Up

At Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande in Pauillac (1978–2003), May-Eliane de Lencquesaing worked as owner and managing director, a role that required both technical judgment and the ability to steer an estate across decades. The years at Pichon placed her inside a corner of Bordeaux where detail is nonnegotiable and reputation accumulates slowly, bottle by bottle. Since 2003, she has been founder and president of Glenelly Estate, carrying that same standard into Stellenbosch, where Bordeaux wine is expressed through a new landscape rather than repeated as a template.

Where They Are Now

At Glenelly Estate in Stellenbosch, South Africa, May-Eliane de Lencquesaing remains the founder and president, with Lady May named as the estate’s signature wine and described as its outstanding wine. Her specialty is Bordeaux wine, and her own formulation of the craft is blunt about the material side of it: glass and wine both begin in poor material and poor soils, and become something more through human skill. The point is craft, not romance — an argument for making with discipline, patience, and exactness.

Signature

The name sits at the center of Glenelly’s identity and reads as a marker of the estate’s direction as much as a label.

In Their Words “Glass and wine have a lot in common. They both come from poor material and poor soils and through man’s talent and genius, they become works of art.” “When I started at Pichon in ’78, everything I knew about winemaking was basically pre-war. So much had changed. So I went back to enology school.” That choice to return to enology school after arriving at Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande says as much about method as any title does. May-Eliane de Lencquesaing met change by learning again, which is often the harder part of maintaining standard in a field that does not stand still.