My phone always shows two clocks...

Last Tuesday at 7pm, I was clearing up after dinner when my phone lit up. Our team was sending a photo from the vineyard. The vines at golden hour, that specific low light you only get over the Néac plateau in June. It was 1pm France time. They were between rows, boots muddy, just thought we should see it.

Marine and I stood in our kitchen in Singapore and looked at our vineyard in France. That's the sentence that still gets me, three years in.

Owning Château Canon Chaigneau from 10,000 kilometres away means the vineyard is always present, just never quite reachable. A WhatsApp from the cellar team at 7pm our time means it's lunchtime in Néac and someone had a thought. A message flagging that the canopy needs attention lands while I'm in a meeting about something else entirely, and I spend the next hour half-thinking about vines. You learn to hold two realities at once. You don't really have a choice.

The 2am calls are real. So is the particular feeling of watching a hailstorm radar track across Bordeaux from a sofa in Singapore, completely unable to do anything about it.

The harder thing to explain is the trust it requires. We can't walk into the vineyard when something feels off. We can't stand in the chai and smell whether the fermentation is right. That all lives with our team — people we've chosen carefully and rely on completely. Running a château remotely is, at its core, an exercise in building the right relationships and then actually letting them work.

What we can do from here, and do every day, is make sure the wine finds the right people. The conversations, the relationships, the quiet work of introducing Cuve 8a to someone who's never heard of Lalande-de-Pomerol and watching them come back for a second bottle. That part happens in Singapore. It happens in the same timezone we sleep in.

Two clocks. Two very different kinds of work. But at the end of the day, they add up to one château.