In France’s peaceful wine country, high-end tourism is booming

Pommard is a famous Burgundian wine village just outside the wine town of Beaune but it’s tiny. When last surveyed, in 2021, the total population was 440.

So imagine how unlikely it is that over the past few years the village has been dominated by giant cranes because not just one but two different Americans have been trying to create luxury hotels there. Tech entrepreneur Michael Baum bought the Château de Pommard in 2014 and has yet to make that much progress with his planned hotel. But Denise Dupré, who acquired the Château de la Commaraine in 2017, is confident of having transformed it into a “hotel, spa and cuverie” by next year.

She will soon have six luxurious hotels on French territory: this one in Burgundy, the well-established Royal Champagne Hotel & Spa plus a boutique hotel in Champagne, one on Paris’s left bank that is being renovated, and two on the Caribbean island of St Barts.

Her portfolio also, crucially, includes three wine producers, all French, as well as vineyards in the up-and-coming Cote d’Or communes of St Aubin and Monthelie bought in 2019 and 2022, respectively.

Dupré and her husband Mark Nunnelly, once a managing director at Bain Capital and then senior in the government of Massachusetts, live in Boston, but have been going to Paris for 35 years.

They got engaged there, have an apartment in the city and are unabashed Francophiles. France was therefore a natural target for the considerable funds at their disposal.

“We had this notion that wine and hotels were synergistic. We had no idea it would work as well as it did,” she says.

I have been visiting Dupré’s wine properties since 2019, but had never been able to track down the dynamic 66-year-old herself until now, and even then only via video call.

Dupré and Nunnelly’s first acquisition outside the French capital, as recently as 2012, was Leclerc Briant, an unusual champagne house and a pioneer of lunar-dictated biodynamic practices in Champagne.

It was while visiting the Champagne region in 2013 that the couple had a meal in the Royal Champagne Hotel, with its unparalleled position overlooking the second Champagne town Épernay.

It was then, as Dupré put it, “really undermanaged. I went and talked to the manager and asked to see a few rooms. Then the next year it came up for sale and we bought it.” Simple!

Travel + Leisure magazine voted the lavishly decorated Royal Champagne Best Resort in France in 2024. With its indoor and outdoor pools, extensive spa, bike tours of the local vineyards and Michelin-starred restaurant, the sedate hostelry I remember had indeed been completely transformed when I spent a night there in October, right down to the satin eye mask that was placed on my pillow.

This is because Dupré has form in the hotel business. She taught hospitality management at Boston University from 1983 to 1995 and then at Harvard until she and her husband founded their own company Champagne Hospitality in 2012. She still does some teaching and fanatically takes pictures for her students of the “good, bad and ugly” in hotels she encounters on her travels.

She reports that now that Champagne Hospitality has established itself as a force, albeit one relatively under the radar (I meet very few people in wine who know anything about it), they attract a steady stream of offers of properties.

She mentioned the possibility of opening somewhere in the south of France at some point but I would have thought an alpine property might be more appropriate.

Dupré, still an avid skier, though now out-skied by her four children, was brought up, the eldest of nine daughters, in Seven Springs in western Pennsylvania, one of America’s oldest ski resorts and founded by her grandparents, immigrants from Alsace and Germany. Her father, aware that the resort was a little lower than ideal for skiers, developed and patented an energy-efficient snow-making system as early as the 1950s. In the 1980s, seeing the need for clean energy, together with his oldest daughter he developed a hydroelectric power plant near the ski area.

“I’m so lucky to have had these lessons of entrepreneurship that have carried me through my career,” she says. (Also in her early twenties, inspired by her walk to work, she designed and marketed the first women’s attaché case that would hold their shoes.)

Along with the word “exquisite” to describe what she’s striving for in her hotels, the word “entrepreneur” keeps coming up during our conversation. When, in 2022, I visited Domaine Belleville in Rully in southern Burgundy, which was acquired in 2015, I was surprised to run into Paul Krug of the famous Champagne dynasty. He now makes the wine there and at Domaine de la Commaraine in Pommard.

“What we saw [in Krug],” says Dupré, “was a young entrepreneur who wanted to make his own name and had to leave Champagne to do that. Despite his youth he has so much to offer. Young people have such untutored talent. At my hotels we take in the maximum number of interns we’re allowed to by law. And they’re always the first group I want to talk to when I visit.”

Dupré and Nunnelly have cleverly identified Burgundy’s Mr Fixit. Louis-Michel Liger-Belair of the Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair in Vosne-Romanée is their adviser and has, I was told, taken Krug under his wing.

Surprisingly, despite a surname inherited from her grandfather, Dupré admits she is not fluent enough to conduct a negotiation in French, but insists that they have tried to have French partners and always act “incredibly respectfully” towards French history and customs.

Inspired by the concentration of female entrepreneurs such as Veuve Clicquot and Lily Bollinger in Champagne, she has now hosted two get-togethers of women in wine at the Royal Champagne Hotel and plans another in Pommard in January 2026.

And the relative appeal of wine and hospitality? Here Dupré admits that, at least where she and her husband have invested, it’s much easier to make money from grapes than hotels.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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