Charging down the red carpet of the 64th Cannes Film Festival last month, the 39-year-old grandson of Baron Philippe de Rothschild recalled his pioneering ancestor’s eccentricities with delight.

“My grandfather was the only Rothschild who detested being referred to as a businessman,” says Julien de Beaumarchais de Rothschild. He’s the baron’s heir and with his 77-year-old mother, Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, owns privately held Baron Philippe de Rothschild SA, which he says annually produces between 100,000 and 150,000 bottles of the Bordeaux first-growth Pauillac Chateau Mouton Rothschild.

It has been that way since 1973, when the baron successfully concluded his 20-year crusade to convince fussy French government vineyard analysts and the fashionable four first-growth chateaux of Margaux, Latour, Haut-Brion and Lafite- Rothschild to include Mouton as the fifth member of the exclusive Grand Cru Classe wine coterie first established by Napoleon III at the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris.

The baron’s lobbying campaign employed the jingle, “First, I cannot be. Second, I do not deign to be. Mouton, I am.” Once accepted into the club, the baron, who wrote and translated poetry, rewrote the ditty to read, “First, I am. Second, I used to be. But Mouton does not change.”

Then, in 1981, seven years before his death and just months before the fabled 1982 crop, when collectors began to hoard Mouton and other Bordeaux first growths as investment vehicles, the baron brokered what at the time was a unique long-term sponsorship accord with Cannes festival organizers.

Official Wine

The roll-over deal ensured that Chateau Mouton Rothschild would remain the festival’s official wine supplier. The baron’s brands, including Mouton Cadet Rothschild, the $8.99 everyday drinking wine he first bottled in 1930, now share the festival’s marquee with official private bank Societe Generale SA, water supplier San Pellegrino and French hair-salon operator Dessange International SA.

“The Cannes Film Festival,” says French Minister of Culture and Communication Frederic Mitterrand, “continues to generate a powerful dream.”

At Cannes, Beaumarchais lives the dream. He waves at the platoons of photographers snapping his photo for lifestyle magazines and smiles when a fan mentions that cinema villain Auric Goldfinger served James Bond a bottle of 1947 Mouton in the movie “Goldfinger.”

“The baron was the elegant bad boy of the Rothschilds,” Beaumarchais says of his grandfather’s role in the family that financed Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, underwrote construction of the Suez Canal, funded the California Gold Rush and brought Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to Paris.

Bugatti Racer

“My grandfather loved life and would have hated the idea of bankers storing Mouton in a vault as an investment,” Beaumarchais says with a frown. “He raced Bugattis at the Grand Prix, Stutz cars at Le Mans and made ‘Lac aux Dames,’” one of the first French talking movies.

As for the baron’s signature drink, “he wanted Mouton to be the wine of adventure, action and exploration,” Beaumarchais says. “Grandfather was full of strength and life and wanted his wine to be drunk among those who shared his humanism. This is my legacy.”

The chateau’s 41-year-old managing director, Hugues Lechanoine, says the minimum price of sharing in that heritage is 300 euros ($432). “A good wine costs 150 euros a bottle,” Lechanoine says on a terrace that overlooks a flotilla of yachts in the Cannes harbor. “A luxury wine starts at 300.”