Jura vigneron Jean-François Ganevat broke his silence yesterday on the September sale of his estate. Here's an English translation of the original French statement.
While there are obviously now more pressing concerns for the Pumpyansky family- what will, I wonder, become of their second super yacht “My Bro”? Even the most cursory of scans of TMK’s Wikipedia entry will tell you that the company does business with a who’s who of repressive regimes (Kazakhstan! Uzbekistan! China!) across the world. The mental gymnastics to get through this piece without drawing attention to the fact that some portion of the funds used to buy Domaine Ganevat were, in some part large or small, raised from regimes who lock up journalists (and place entire ethnic groups in concentration camps of course) are positively Olympian.
Somehow worse still is the fact that a golden opportunity to confront a man who is one of the planet’s leading greenwashers (“Never mind those polluted rivers you must taste our biodynamically-farmed vin jaune!”) is passed up without a mention of the catastrophic effects of his family’s reliance on iron ore extraction to keep them in boutique Jura domaines - quite stunning.
He even parrots Putin and Lavrov with almost depressing accuracy by saying that Russians and Ukrainians are “at the base the same people” without even the merest of nudges from you to remind him that at the time of this interview one half of those “same people” were currently trying to wipe a good portion of the other half off the face of the earth.
I do understand that your audience comes to your newsletter to satisfy their curiosity for a relatively narrow set of interests and no one expects you to suddenly morph into a mondeuse-fueled Paxman; but for a man I once witnessed berate a woman on Twitter for posing for a photo in front of a conventionally farmed vineyard, when confronted with the people whose avarice is actively destroying the planet (not to mention the fact that this man’s father unquestionably has played his part in propping up a regime that is currently murdering children across Ukraine) you suddenly come over awfully supine. Wouldn’t want to lose that allocation though, hey?
Hi Aaron,
While there are obviously now more pressing concerns for the Pumpyansky family- what will, I wonder, become of their second super yacht “My Bro”? Even the most cursory of scans of TMK’s Wikipedia entry will tell you that the company does business with a who’s who of repressive regimes (Kazakhstan! Uzbekistan! China!) across the world. The mental gymnastics to get through this piece without drawing attention to the fact that some portion of the funds used to buy Domaine Ganevat were, in some part large or small, raised from regimes who lock up journalists (and place entire ethnic groups in concentration camps of course) are positively Olympian.
Somehow worse still is the fact that a golden opportunity to confront a man who is one of the planet’s leading greenwashers (“Never mind those polluted rivers you must taste our biodynamically-farmed vin jaune!”) is passed up without a mention of the catastrophic effects of his family’s reliance on iron ore extraction to keep them in boutique Jura domaines - quite stunning.
He even parrots Putin and Lavrov with almost depressing accuracy by saying that Russians and Ukrainians are “at the base the same people” without even the merest of nudges from you to remind him that at the time of this interview one half of those “same people” were currently trying to wipe a good portion of the other half off the face of the earth.
I do understand that your audience comes to your newsletter to satisfy their curiosity for a relatively narrow set of interests and no one expects you to suddenly morph into a mondeuse-fueled Paxman; but for a man I once witnessed berate a woman on Twitter for posing for a photo in front of a conventionally farmed vineyard, when confronted with the people whose avarice is actively destroying the planet (not to mention the fact that this man’s father unquestionably has played his part in propping up a regime that is currently murdering children across Ukraine) you suddenly come over awfully supine. Wouldn’t want to lose that allocation though, hey?