Constance Festival Culinary 2023
4/17/23, 2:59 PM
Jérôme Faure – the Indian Ocean's Mr Motivator | JancisRobinson.com
restaurants but he has no intention of selling them on – he’s lucky that Jean-Jacques Vallet, the CEO of the Constance group, is a wine-lover who facilitates Faure’s investment in wine and storage as well as in training. On the other hand, as Ramasawmy pointed out and as Vallet surely knows, ‘In a restaurant you can sell food for €200 but you can sell a bottle of wine for €1,000 if you know what you are doing.’ But more important for the everyday drinking in the restaurants are the regular arrivals of the reefers. One month they may get a container from New Zealand and the lists are dominated by those wines. Another month may be the turn of Germany. Buying directly means both that Faure is in control of the shipping conditions (making sure the wine never sits unprotected on a hot quay), essential in a tropical climate, and that the prices are a good deal lower than you might expect in a fve-star hotel that has to import just about everything long-distance. (There’s a delivery of meat and fsh from Dubai once a week.) Faure may be a Mr Motivator when it comes to young Mauritians new to the big, wide world of wine but he has also made a huge diference to wine lovers visiting the island. Michelin-starred, Japanese-born chef Masashi Ijichi of La Cachette in Valence, who was there for the culinary festival – as a guest chef as well as judge with me in one of the competitions – has known Faure for ten years. He believes that Faure ‘has brought the world of wine, and a magnifcent wine list, to Mauritius. People come to the island just for the wine’. What will happen if Faure leaves, I ask Julie. ‘He has created a wine culture. But there won’t be another one like him.’ Part of the sprawling tropical paradise of Belle Mare Plage
https://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/jerome-faure-indian-oceans-mr-motivator
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