On rare and historic wines
A wine from 1811 calls for particular care, from the moment it is opened to the moment it is served.
François Audouze, in his own cellar.
The man who gave his name to a verb
Audouzer: to uncork an old bottle at least four hours before drinking it.
Bernard Pivot, who knew him, gave the word a place in his Dictionnaire amoureux du vin. It is named after François Audouze.
Born in 1943 and a graduate of the École Polytechnique, he led a steel group of four thousand people before turning, in 1997, to what had already become his subject. It began in 1976, on a Climens 1923.
His cellar holds more than forty thousand bottles, ten thousand of them over fifty years old, and he has tasted every vintage of Château d'Yquem of the last hundred and fifty years.
Slow oxygenation
Opened hours before. Given time to breathe.
Audouze opens his bottles four to five hours before they are drunk, and leaves them untouched afterwards. No decanting, no aerating device. The sediment stays where a century put it.
He has applied this to more than a thousand bottles made before 1945.
Opening a bottle, hours before the meal.
A commission
We asked him to build a meal with the rarest bottles from his collection.
The Lunch of the Century · 23 October 2026
It took place in Paris, in a three-Michelin-starred restaurant within a palace hotel, reserved for eleven guests and François Audouze. The chef, known well beyond France, wrote the menu in answer to the bottles.
Twelve exceptional bottles were opened. Among them:
Château Lafite 1811From the year of the Great Comet, when growers in Bordeaux and Champagne already suspected they were making something that would not come again.
Château d'Yquem 1865From one of the last great vintages before phylloxera devastated much of Europe's vineyards.
Champagne Juglar, circa 1820Raised in 2010 from a wreck fifty metres down in the Baltic, where the cold and the pressure had kept it for nearly two centuries.
Krug Clos du Mesnil 1979The first vintage ever bottled from that walled vineyard.
The photographs are of the bottles themselves.
François Audouze sat at the table with the guests and gave the history and provenance of each bottle, one after another.
The brigade comes into the room. 23 October 2026.
The twelve bottles, at the end of the meal.
With wines of this age, uncertainty is part of the experience. Despite careful preservation and preparation, a bottle may no longer be suitable for tasting. This possibility is explained to every guest before booking.
Every occasion begins with a conversation.
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