Distinguished Hosts

Andy Barr

Andy Barr has served as the U.S. Congressman for Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District since January of 2013. Congressman Barr is a senior Member of the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) and the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC). In 2020, Congressman Barr was also appointed to the House China Task Force, which was established to position the United States to confront the military, technological, economic and political threat of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Congressman Barr is a strong leader who upholds the Constitution and is a champion of conservative values.

Jamie Ritchie

Jamie Ritchie recently left his role as Worldwide Chairman of Sotheby’s Wines & Spirits, having been with Sotheby’s for more than 32 years. This July, he will be joining an innovative new business in the wine and spirits world.

Jamie joined Sotheby’s in London in 1990 and was responsible for setting-up Sotheby’s wine auctions in New York in 1994, Hong Kong in 2009 and France in 2021, as well as Sotheby’s Spirits category in 2019. In 2010, Mr. Ritchie launched Sotheby’s Wine, a retail store and online wine business, located at their flagship headquarters in New York, with a second location in the Sotheby’s gallery in Hong Kong. A range of Sotheby’s Own Label wines was introduced in 2019. Mr. Ritchie also initiated Sotheby’s new auction partnerships with the Hospices de Beaune (2021), The Worshipful Company of Distiller’s (2021) and the Napa Valley Vintners (2022).  Under his leadership, Sotheby’s worldwide wine & spirits auction business achieved record sales of $132 million in 2021.

Jane Anson

Jane Anson has lived in Bordeaux since 2003 and is founder of janeanson.com, the site that she launched in October 2021 after leaving Decanter magazine, where she was longtime Bordeaux correspondent. Recipient of the ISWC 2023 Wine Communicator Trophy, Jane is author of Inside Bordeaux (called a ‘category buster’ by Wine Anorak and ‘the Bordeaux bible’ by Le Figaro), Wine Revolution (Quarto 2017), The Club of Nine (Katz Publishing 2016) Angélus (Editions de la Martiniere, 2016) and Bordeaux Legends, a history of the 1855 First Growth wines (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2013, reissued as an NFT ebook in June 2022), as well as co-author or translator of over a dozen wine and travel books. She has won several awards for her writing, including Louis Roederer Wine Online Communicator of the Year 2020, and Born Digital Best Editorial 2020. She is a graduate of the DUAD tasting diploma with the Bordeaux Institute of Oenology, an accredited wine teacher at the Bordeaux Ecole du Vin and co-founder of the Bordeaux Mentor Week (inaugural edition September 2022) aimed at opening up diversity and access in the world of wine.

Jean-Guillaume Prats

A native of the Médoc region, Jean-Guillaume has been president and CEO of Cos d’Estournel for 14 years. During this time, he created Cos Blanc from scratch, and also brought innovation to the estate, notably with the creation of the new vat room. Then, Jean-Guillaume Prats left Bordeaux and for more than 5 years, he was president of LVMH wines worldwide: 17 estates in total.