This is a fascinating account of an American wine lover who threw off the shackles of a family real estate business in Washington, D.C., moved with his family to Burgundy, and started a wine business: Maison Alex Gambal. Gambal’s story has an arc to it, starting with a fledgling beginning and a young family’s move across the Atlantic Ocean. There is drama along the way, as stress on the family and a French–American commute leads to divorce, then a new marriage that is abruptly ended by illness, and ultimately the sale of Maison Alex Gambal to a French négociant.

There is much to learn about the economics of Burgundy’s wine business from this book, as Gambal makes his way through its complex structure to purchase grapes and subsequently vineyards, to make wine, and then to sell it. It is one of those rare examples of an insider who, having left the field, has few concerns about trade secrets.

I met alex Gambal when he was a mere wine lover, well before his move to France. Back then we enjoyed a dinner in Washington where we shared some interesting wine, and even plotted a wine seminar that never materialized. It was apparent that Alex had an inclination to leave the family business, but what to do? Back in those days of the 1980s, Washington was a mecca for retail wine buyers, in part because retailers could import directly and often had the best prices for imported wines in the country. As chance would have it, Alex’s wine merchant used these connections to help arrange some wine tasting in Burgundy, part of his first visit to France.

The common denominator in this story is the late Becky Wasserman, an American woman who had developed a firm (Becky Wasserman and Company, which still exists, with the same mission, in Beaune) that distributed some of the small growers’ wines from the Burgundy region.

Wasserman was a larger than life character who lived with Russell Hone, a bigger than life English wine merchant, in her spacious home in Savigny-lès-Beaune. I met them just once, when Clive Coates, a prominent English wine writer had just arrived with the gift of a cache of Scotch and “trashy” romance novels, so described by Wasserman as something hard to find in France. Wasserman presided over a fascinating stew of wine characters, and it was no surprise to me when I read that Gambal, who had been offered a job with Wasserman’s company, decided to make the move.

The whole Gambal family moved to Beaune, wife and two young children, and the latter were promptly enrolled in French school—at an age when accents are not yet firmly established—and quickly became bilingual. This is clearly a happy period in Gambal’s life, everything from his sales work, to wine friendly dinners with new friends, to his ultimate enrollment in the local Centre de Formation Professionnelle et de Promotion Agricole (CFPPA) to learn winemaking. As the book progresses, Gambal offers insights into the world of Burgundy and the complexity of farming, making wine, and selling it.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the book is the discussion of deal making, which in our current political environment may be of considerable general interest. Gambal came from the real estate business, and he states this explicitly: “Confession: I am a deal junkie. I love real estate and real estate guys love doing deals. They always have and they always will. There is an inherent rush, adrenaline and fear, to buying and selling property.” This preface begins a series of chapters in which Gambal describes assembling an extraordinary assortment of Burgundy premier cru properties with famous names. The discussion ends with a kind of deal-making climax: the purchase of part of the famed grand cru Bâtard-Montrachet, one of the most famous vineyards in the world, and something few outside (or even inside) France ever imagine owning.

The end of Gambal’s story comes in a rush, as for various reasons—including the devastating cancer his second wife suffers—he decides to sell his holdings in Burgundy and retire to skiing in Idaho. His afterword, written in 2023, is a very public warning about the extraordinary prices then (and now) being achieved by the most famous names in Burgundy. Is it a bubble or the new normal, Gambal asks, while adding “It is just grape juice…”