Vineyard Manager Michel Sementery joined Cos thirty-five years ago. His grandfather and father both worked at Cos, the latter devoting his entire career to the estate where he was born. Today, his son Guillaume and his daughter Estelle are also part of the team. He shares his thoughts on his family’s dedication to Cos as he strolls through the different plots of the vineyard.
Cos was like a village. There were cottages for the farmhands; the only thing missing was a chapel. My grandparents lived on a farm on the estate, and that is where my father was born in 1934. In the evenings, all the children would get together and sit on the wall of the farm. That’s how I remember it: I can still see us lined up on that wall, right in front of what is now Plot 11, the one in front of the Château.
When I was a child, the estate pulsed with the activities of everyone who lived there as we went about our lives, washing laundry in the fountain, baking bread . . . Some families stayed on at Cos for a long time and left their mark on the estate. This spirit of family, which lives on to this day, certainly owes something to this heritage.
My grandparents came to Cos from the Haute-Vienne department in 1933. They were millers, but my grandfather had developed a reputation for being a talented herdsman. The vineyard manager at Cos d’Estournel hired him to look after the cows that provided manure for the vineyard and the oxen that drew its plows. My father worked in the vineyard for forty years, while his older brother started out in the cellars and ended up becoming cellar master up until 1981.
When you spend your afternoons as a child perched on tractors observing the vineyard and your Saturday afternoons as a teenager pruning vines with your father, you learn so much. You end up knowing the vineyard by heart: every row of vines, every plot, every nook and cranny.
I joined Cos at the age of sixteen and have tried my hand at all the different trades. For the first ten years, I worked as a vine-grower. When my father retired in 1994, I took on his position as tractor operator. It was in 2001, just after Michel Reybier acquired the estate, that I became the estate’s vineyard manager. It was our Technical Director Dominique Arangoïts who asked me to take on the role.
Since 2001, I have sought to contribute to the team, to teach them all that I have learned. This is my goal; otherwise pursuing a career like mine, where you invest so much of yourself, would be senseless. Some of the people on my team were here before me, and others joined us in recent years. The goal is for us to work together as smoothly as possible and for each member of the team to be in it for the long haul.
This is what teamwork is all about: we talk to each other, we listen to each other, and we move together in the same direction. I may tell them what to do, but I also ask them to think for themselves and to come up with the best solutions. I think it is working with a dedicated team and sharing all that I know that makes my work so satisfying, day in and day out.
Hardly! At first, I thought each year would resemble the last, and that it would mean repeating the same things over and over: pruning in winter, positioning the shoots in spring and harvesting in September. That wasn’t necessarily what I was looking for. But as time went by, I realized that each vintage was unique. Conditions were never the same, and things always varied from one year to the next. It was when I came to that understanding that the work began to fascinate me. When you start working on a vintage, it always seems like the best you’ve ever seen.
And when you constantly talk about your work—at lunch, at dinner, on vacation—you end up conveying this passion to your sons and daughters. My children were immersed in all of this, so I was not at all surprised when they asked to come work at Cos. Each has his or her specialty: Estelle works in sales and Guillaume in the vineyard. To this day, we are always talking about Cos, at work and at home!
What I value most is the fact that Cos has remained humble and discreet. This is true of our people. They were trained by their predecessors, many of whom spent years at Cos, and some of whom are still with us, driven by their passion for the estate. It is partly thanks to this spirit of humility that Cos has become what it is today. We are always ready to embrace change. In my role over the last twenty years, this has meant revisiting the techniques we use in the vineyard and working to respect our people and the environment around us.
This approach works quite well. For me, it is crucial that we cherish our vineyard and keep it in good shape for future generations; we have been entrusted with the care of land that was once tended to by our grandparents and parents, and some of us are fortunate enough to see our children working that very same land.
