Lifetime Achievement Award – Philippine de Rothschild
Guiding one of the world's great wine dynasties into the 21st century.
The leading lady of wine—that is the way Baroness Philippine de Rothschild is often characterized, and she more than plays the part. With a formal background in theater—she spent some 30 years as an actress in her native France —and, since 1988, at the helm of one of the world’s most important wine dynasties, the role was written for her.
But though she plays her leading-lady role with flair and seeming ease—indeed, her life might seem enchanted to some—her early years were marked by tragedy. In 1945, as a young child during World War II, she witnessed the Gestapo capture her mother for deportation to Ravensbrück, where her mother later died. “I would have been taken away too, only, for whatever reason, I was overlooked and left behind,” she recalls. Her father, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, an art collector, race car driver and lover of poetry, was lucky, too; he escaped from the Nazis and lived to make his mark as a visionary of the wine world. Over his long career, every step taken by the baron to advance premier cru classe Château Mouton-Rothschild rumbled with repercussions felt in vineyards across the planet.
https://www.winemag.com/2005/12/05/lifetime-achievement-award-philippine-de-rothschild/