“A charming, simple daughter of the sea.” That’s how French writer Guy de Maupassant described the Mediterranean fishing village of Saint-Tropez when he first came upon it in the 19th century. “A little nook of paradise,” said Brigitte Bardot, who discovered the Riviera peninsula in the 1950s as a young starlet filming Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, and has lived there ever since.
“The problem with Saint-Tropez is there is only one road to get there, and the same road to get out,” wrote French novelist Colette, who had a beachfront bungalow on Saint-Tropez’s Baie de Canoubiers in the 1920s and ’30s. “But who wants to get out?”
What makes the Saint-Tropez peninsula paradisiacal is its jagged coastline sliced by long, Sahara-sand beaches, and its gentle inland hills with hiking paths through ancient olive groves, majestic parasol pine forests, and swathes of wild lavender and thyme. “The scent of eviscerated melons, nougat and sea urchins,” Colette wrote. The warm, sharp light, which painters Paul Signac, Henri Matisse, and Dunoyer de Segonzac so graciously captured in landscapes, many of which are on display at the portside Musée de l’Annonciade.
And the vineyards—acres of them sweeping across the hills and flats, and patches of them tucked in private gardens behind old stone walls. “Our Tropezian secrets: these little, hidden vineyards,” says Laura Garès, sales director for Les Vignerons de Torpez, the Saint-Tropez wine cooperative. “They are the true patrimony of the region.”
Fondugues-Pradugues.
Vineyards on the Saint-Tropez peninsula, which includes the port of Saint-Tropez and the hilltop villages of Ramatuelle and Gassin, produce the grapes for Côtes de Provence rosé, the crisp, translucent pink wine that is served with crudités and anchoïade at the Pampelonne Beach clubs, and with salty black olives at the cafés on the Place des Lices, as locals play boules under the plane trees, and aboard yachts sailing into port at sunset, and at late-night dinners along the narrow cobblestone streets. Rosé is as much a part of life in Saint-Tropez as sunshine and the Mediterranean Sea, and its evolution mirrors the history of the peninsula, from the simplicity that Maupassant described, to its current iteration as a billionaires’ playground. In short, to understand Saint-Tropez, one must first understand rosé.
The ancient art of wine-making was brought to France by the Greeks in the 6th century BCE. The first vineyards were an hour down the coast, towards Marseille. Comparatively speaking, the Saint-Tropez wine business is new—only since the early 20th century in earnest.
And for most of that time, Saint-Tropez in all regards was a small, intimate, and democratic community. “There was a mix of families and people who partied,” recalls Régine Sumeire, owner of Château de Barbeyrolles, the most venerated vineyard on the peninsula. “That’s what made it Saint-Tropez.”
Laurent Nouvion, a Monegasque whose parents—sixth-generation wine growers and merchants—bought the vineyard Fondugues-Pradugues in Ramatuelle in 1964, and who spent his summer holidays on the peninsula, agrees. “There was a magic mixture, with the poor people, normal people, wealthy people, famous, not famous,” he says. “And everybody was drinking shitty rosé, but nobody cared.”
That’s all evaporated in the last decade, with the corporatization and luxurification of Saint-Tropez by major conglomerates, most notably LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the Paris-based group of 75 luxury brands owned and run by Bernard Arnault, the world’s richest person and longtime Saint-Tropez summer resident. (Arnault has a waterfront villa in the exclusive gated community of Les Parcs de Saint-Tropez; his middle-aged son, Antoine, recently bought a neighboring house for $18.8 million.)
Château de Barbeyrolles.
So omnipresent is the luxury group—a neighborhood pottery shop became a Louis Vuitton store; a local art exhibition space is now a Dior store and café; an affordable hotel was turned into LVMH’s upscale White 1921, with a Michelin-starred chef; and so on—that town municipal councilor Vérane Guérin declared that Saint-Tropez is “LVMH-Ville.”
The cultural and social shift brought on by this luxury invasion has been so dramatic that two French academics studied the changes and published their findings in Oxford University Press’s Socio-Economic Review. Saint-Tropez, they wrote, “is an emblematic place to observe not only elite self-segregation, but the rise of inequality as well.”
“Elites shape their environment through the physical and symbolic power they exert over space,” the researchers stated, adding, “it took considerable work to adapt local amenities to their tastes.” The town did adapt—gated communities, private clubs, five-star hotels, wildly expensive restaurants and discos—and transformed itself from “a show-off place of conspicuous consumption” to one of “‘conspicuous seclusion.’”
As one local winegrower, who was nearly 100 years old when interviewed by the researchers, said: “Before long there will be nothing but billionaires!”
That is why a handful of local vineyard owners and winemakers, including Sumeire; Marie Pascaud of Château de Pampelonne; Patrice de Colmont, owner of Les Bouis and the Club 55; and Nouvion and his life partner, the southern Illinois–native Stephen Roberts, are fighting to maintain the charm and simplicity of the Saint-Tropez that Maupassant described.
Read the full story in the new issue of PALMER ON THE ROAD, available now.