Wine and spirits
A product rooted in a terroir, a succession played out within the family, but global markets subject to customs duties, embargoes and excise duties in the destination country: wine and spirits live with this contradiction permanently.
Each major export market has its own rules: tariff classification, specific duties, commercial retaliation measures that hit French wine and spirits in response to disputes that often have nothing to do with them. Added to this is the question, specific to this sector, of passing on an estate or a house from one generation to the next.
We support producers, merchants and spirits houses on both fronts: securing exports, organising succession.
Your experience
A bottle crosses a border and runs into an excise duty, a tariff classification, sometimes a commercial retaliation measure decided for reasons that have nothing to do with it: a geopolitical dispute that has never heard of your house is settled at the expense of your export market.
The family estate raises a different question: its value is not only patrimonial but also living: know-how, a generation, a name. Such a distinctive heritage is not passed on like a securities portfolio.
Our expertise
We secure your export operations market by market, and we anticipate measures that threaten an outlet before they fall, not afterwards.
We structure the transfer of estates and houses between generations ahead of time, never in reaction to a tax deadline which, for its part, waits for no one.
We defend designations of origin and geographical indications against misuse, in France and in export markets where counterfeiting thrives far from the rights holder’s gaze. On land, we structure agricultural land groupings (groupements fonciers agricoles) and long-term rural leases, instruments specific to wine-growing property that ordinary company law ignores.
The climate is already shifting grape varieties. The generation that built the estates’ reputation is handing over, in a market where land attracts capital from outside the wine world. And exports, the backbone of the great houses, are now negotiated under tariff and geopolitical constraints as much as climatic ones.
