Patrick Lesec – A Man on a Mission

It is not too often that one has the privilege to meet someone who has really made a difference in his chosen areas of endeavour. Patrick Lesec is one such person. He is both passionately French and clinically objective – a rare combination of head and heart which is the foundation of his success. A little of his history will provide an insight as to why he has achieved so much.

Patrick spent over ten years living and working with wines in California, running restaurants in Los Angeles from the early ‘80’s through to the early ‘90’s. He says that during this time he grew increasingly frustrated that so many of the wines of his homeland (to single out somewhere close to his heart in particular) were not achieving their true potential and not providing consumers with what they really wanted. He became more and more concerned that winemakers were becoming increasingly out of touch with what wine drinkers (in his restaurant) were looking for - hedonistic, flavoursome wines that made a positive impact.

He felt that ‘gloss rather then substance’ was the order of the day, and that too many wines with exalted reputations were ‘milking their reputation’ rather than delivering real excitement – lacking generosity and pure drinking pleasure. Whether this was as a result of the excessive caution or just ingrained attitudes and techniques of their winemakers or commercial cynicism may be open to debate, but few would argue that the quality potential of many estates, especially in the Old World, was not being realised.

All this served as a real eye-opener to Patrick. Too often in his opinion he was being presented with wines made from grapes that were over-cropped and then picked too soon, that suffered from not undergoing cold maceration, and he believed that the wines were over-worked – they were racked too often and were systematically over-filtered, a combination which further stripped out primary fruit character and body.