Stephanie Rigourd talks the way she apparently does everything: fast, forward, and with the energy of someone who has never quite been able to slow down. Ideas arrive mid-sentence and overtake each other. Details she has not thought about in years surface with the vividness of last week. She laughs frequently at herself most of all. Spend an hour with her and you leave slightly breathless, as if you have been trying to keep up with someone on a motorbike – which, as it turns out, is not entirely a metaphor.
She was not supposed to end up here. Not in Singapore, not in fine wine, and certainly not as general manager and partner of one of the city-state’s leading French fine wine importers. By her own admission, she was a lousy student, a village girl from the Rhône Valley who had never heard the word “sommelier” until someone said it to her at sixteen. “I was very lousy at school,” she says, with the cheerful bluntness of someone who resolved that particular wound a long time ago. “And after reflection, I realised that maybe hospitality was the best field for me because I was a gymnast for fifteen years, so I needed to move.”
What she could not have known then was that the move she needed would take her considerably further than she imagined.
The girl on the waiting list
The person who first saw something in her was a restaurateur in her hometown – someone who had lived in Washington, South Africa and Italy, who occasionally slipped into English or Italian mid-conversation, and who represented, to a girl who had never left her village for anything larger than a family trip around France, a doorway to a world she did not know existed.
“They convinced me that I was smart,” she says, “which at the time I was sure I was not. It took me many years to realise I’m actually not that stupid,” she giggles, “because the whole education system, if you’re bad at school, you are bad. Full stop.” She pauses just long enough to let the absurdity of that land. “But they told me: you are smart enough to do something else with your life. And your small village is too small. You need to get out of here.”
They also told her about the profession of sommelier. She had never encountered one. Her family, warm, food-obsessed, working-class, did not go to the kind of restaurants where sommeliers appeared. What they did do, every single night, was eat properly. Starter, main, cheese, dessert. Wine on the table. “Even if you buy a simple slice of pâté from the charcuterie,” she says, “there is no way you serve it out of the paper. You will always put it in the plate with some garnish, although there is no guest.” She grins. “For my dad, food and wine is very important. We take meals very seriously.”
Around the same time, she watched a film called L’Aile ou la Cuisse, a French comedy classic. In the film, a food critic played by Louis de Funès defends the idea that quality matters, that taste has meaning, that people are not, in the end, indifferent to the difference between something good and something fake. In the film’s climax, the critic identifies a bottle of Château Léoville Las Cases in a blind tasting, by sight alone, having lost his sense of smell. “As a kid, when I saw that” she stops, searching for the right word “this whole movie kind of inspired me. And it came together with the idea that hospitality could be great for me. Then I meet these people who tell me I’m not that stupid. Altogether I was like: okay, what is sommelier then?”
What she found, when she looked, was that one of France’s most reputable sommelier schools happened to be in her region. The school of Tain-l’Hermitage accepts only fourteen students per year – a deliberate constraint, since the school must simultaneously find fourteen wineries and fourteen restaurants willing to take trainees. Its graduates run the cellars of France’s finest Michelin-starred tables. When Rigourd applied, fresh from a waitress apprenticeship she describes as socially stigmatised” at the time “you’re kind of a loser,” she says. “That’s how I felt it, through the comments I received, the looks.” She was put on the waiting list.
They asked what she would do if they didn’t take her. She told them she would enroll in a kitchen course and reapply the following year, and the year after that, until they relented. Two weeks before the programme began, two students dropped out. They called her. “Sure,” she said. “I take it.”
Getting there, physically, was its own ordeal. Every morning, she rode a small motorbike for half an hour to catch a bus that took another hour to reach Tain. School finished at four in the afternoon. The bus home left at seven. She waited three hours, every day.
Getting there, physically, was its own ordeal. Every morning, she rode a small motorbike for half an hour to catch a bus that took another hour to reach Tain. School finished at four in the afternoon. The bus home left at seven. She waited three hours, every day.
When the school then assigned her to a month-long harvest placement at a winery with no accommodation, a further twenty minutes from the bus stop, she sat down and cried. Her solution, as she later confessed to me, was simple: a tent. “In my mind, I was determined,” she says. “My only option was to take a tent.” She bursts into laughter at the memory.
Then luck intervened. A gymnastics coach mentioned that her daughter happened to live nearby. Rigourd ended up sharing a room with the coach’s daughter, sparing herself a month of living under canvas during harvest.
An eye-opener
The school itself hit her like a door swinging open onto a room she hadn’t known was there. Her teacher, Pascal Boucher, was the kind of educator who made you feel, at ten in the morning, that you were already sitting down to eat. He lectured from memory, no spreadsheets, no handouts. Students wrote everything down by hand, in notebooks, every word. “Just because of the way he was talking about food and wine pairing,” she says, leaning forward, “you feel like eating. He has this power to make you travel around France.” She shakes her head, still amazed. “I knew I liked wine. But by meeting him, by being in that school, it opened my eyes. I deeply fell in love with wine at that moment.”
Boucher had another conviction he pressed into his students: that the sommelier’s reputation for arrogance was a professional embarrassment, and that the first thing you did when you arrived at his school was remove your tie and go straight to the vineyard. The programme began not with tastings or textbooks but with harvest, a month of physical immersion in the mechanics of winemaking before a single classroom hour. “When you have spent the whole day cleaning the barrels with sulfur,” she says, “you remember the smell all your life. When you have done a pump over by yourself, you understand. When you see the stress the winemakers go through during harvest. Who am I to judge them the rest of the year? Who am I to judge them on their work?” She is briefly serious. “Wine is the most humble thing. It really depends on nature. So a sommelier should be humble too.”
Two years later, she graduated with the school’s annual distinction, one recipient, per cohort. She was the youngest in her class and, by her own account, the one who had arrived least credentialed. “When after two years they gave only one distinction,” she pauses, eyes wide, as if she still cannot fully believe it, “I was like, oh.” Another pause. Then, quietly: “Wine kind of brought me out of my shell.”
Redemption in Burgundy
One of her first postings was at Les Sources de Caudalie at Château Smith Haut Lafitte in Bordeaux, under a young sommelier named Christophe Santos, who would later take over from Pascal Boucher as head of the Tain school.
She spent a year in Bordeaux, visiting 142 châteaux, saturating herself in the region until she could think in it, dream in it. She knew it intimately. Perhaps too intimately.
The reckoning came one evening when Santos asked her to fetch a bottle of Aloxe-Corton from the cellar. The cellar was organised geographically, north to south, like a map of France. Rigourd knew the system. What she forgot, in her Bordeaux-saturated mind, was that Aloxe-Corton sits at the top of the Côte de Beaune, not the base of the Côte de Nuits. She went to the wrong section. Santos fetched the bottle himself, served the guests, and said nothing until she returned upstairs empty-handed. “If I was waiting for you,” he told her, “they would be very thirsty.” And she decided, on the spot, that she needed to go to Burgundy.
She then wrote etters to every one-Michelin-star restaurant in the region. Three interviews, three offers, and she chose Le Charlemagne. She fell in love with Burgundy the moment she entered it. “When I see the signage of Gevrey-Chambertin, I went crazy,” she says. “And the first time I drove up the hill. I was shocked. I almost cried. Until now, this hill, when I go up it, gives me chills.”
The reason why she chose Le Charlemagne, a single Michelin-star restaurant at the foot of the Corton-Charlemagne hill, was partly because it was the smallest, which meant she would actually run things rather than polish glasses behind someone else. There were evenings when she managed the dining room entirely alone: twelve tables across two rooms, a summer terrace, one sommelier. Her.
There are many nights where she finished at one in the morning. She ironed tablecloths. She cleaned toilets. She cried regularly. “How can I even be standing up?” she says. “But I loved it. I mean – I loved it!”
She was twenty-two when a group of Singaporeans walked in for lunch. One of them, a Frenchman accompanying the party, asked if she spoke English. She did not. He challenged her on her wine knowledge anyway. At the end of the meal, he handed her his card. “If you are looking for a job,” he said, “let me know.”
She did, and it led to her first trip outside of France to Singapore and a job as sommelier at Hilton hotel.
Singapore, from scratch
She arrived in 2009 speaking no English. Within six months, it was no longer a problem. “My English is very good,” she says, with the unapologetic pride of someone who earned it the hard way. “And I’m proud of it, I have to say.”
Her mentor, a Singapore businessman she credits as one of the most formative figures in her professional life, guided her not only through the wine lists of the city’s luxury hotel circuit but through the social architecture of a world she was navigating for the first time. How to present herself. How to read a room. What not to say, and how not to say it. “He really guided me to blend into the society,” she says. “And he trusted me. When I think about it, I was so young. The chance he gave me was huge.”
She spent six years at the Hilton Singapore, including developing wine education programmes built, deliberately, on accessibility. Teaching, she discovered, was something that lived in her. “I hated school, I hated being taught. So I tried to turn this into something fun and dynamic. And I couldn’t take myself too seriously anyway because I was so young.” It worked.
Working for Hilton in Singapore led her to many unforgettable experiences. She poured wine in the F1 paddocks, selected bottles for private dinners with Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, and when curiosity about the different wine producing countries outgrew what her training had given her, she asked the hotel to fund wine trips to different wine growing regions. They agreed, reimbursing flights, car hire, hotels, meals. “Such a huge chance,” she says. “Singapore [for me] was the American dream!”
After Hilton, she moved on to Singapore’s extra-luxurious hotel Raffles as wine director for two years before moving on to the next chapter of her career.
Then came Vintage Wine Club.
The push
Vintage found her at the right moment. Founded by three French expats in 2014 who had moved to Singapore, the company over the years had built a reputation for French wine at the premium end of the market. It operates with a direct-import model and a client base that skewed young – thirties and forties, increasingly educated, increasingly curious about grower Champagne and Burgundy and things they had not tried before. Speaking of the local wine market, “I feel it’s a lot easier to make local markets try different things than the French, for instance,” she says. “Definitely more open-minded.”
What attracted Rigourd, after the hierarchies of the hotel world, was the absence of one. “I’m a bad employee if my boss is not someone I can learn from or who gives me autonomy. No ego. Very transparent, very straightforward, very healthy.”
She joined in 2018 as director of sales. She became a partner in 2021. The General Manager title came in 2023, but not without a fight.
She had made it clear she wanted to become General Manager. She asked for the role more than once. Each time, she was told some version of the same thing: not yet. Her financial skills needed work. Her leadership still had to be proven. She wasn’t quite ready. “Everything Chris told me, it stung,” she says, referring to the company co-founder Christophe Cazaux-Maleville. “But it became fuel.” She laughs. “I become furious. Not by saying things. By doing things. By getting things done.”
Instead of arguing, she treated every criticism as a project. She strengthened her financial knowledge, expanded her responsibilities and kept delivering results. Then she asked again. In 2023, Rigourd got the role she had been pushing for. She was appointed General Manager.
She grins. “I didn’t give them a choice.”
Today, Vintage Wine Club operates under 360Wine, a wine group that includes fine wine businesses such as Wine Source in the UK and the US, Cavissima in France, Bordeaux négociant Vinexperience, and several other ventures.
But Singapore’s fine wine market is no longer as buoyant as it once was. Much of the slowdown can be traced to the country’s struggling F&B sector. Between January and April this year, Singapore recorded 1,267 food business closures, according to official data, nearly half the total number of closures seen in all of 2025, when 3,148 food businesses ceased operations.
Rigourd says she is working twice as hard to generate the same revenue as a year ago, pulling levers she thought she had long left behind. More WhatsApp messages. More emails. More outreach. More hustle. More of everything.
She is nearly forty and says she is learning, for the first time, to pace herself. “I’m in the phase of my age where I’m trying to learn to slow down,” she says, “because otherwise I will burn out.” The survival-fighter mode that carried her from a Rhône Valley village, past a tent she nearly lived in, along a highway she probably should not have ridden, and through dining rooms she ran alone at midnight – that mode, she knows, cannot run forever.
But ask her about harvest mornings in Burgundy – the tractor lights moving across the hills before dawn, the smell of fermentation drifting over the town, the feeling that the whole world is in motion toward something that matters – and the pace quickens, the eyes light up, and Stephanie Rigourd is twenty-two again, driving up a hill that still gives her chills.
“There’s this kind of emotion,” she says. “I don’t know how to explain the excitement. The sun rises, you see in the hills all the lights from the tractors going around. Everyone is in a hurry. You can feel this excitement. The time leaves around the harvest time. And you have this smell in the town – the smell of the winery, the fermentation. It’s so unique.” She stops. Then: “Must be part of the training for a sommelier. Must be.”
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