CHRISTEN MONGE, who has died aged 61, was a creative force in the international advertising industry before founding an award-winning Sussex vineyard. In the mid-1980s Monge was an art director with Ogilvy & Mather in London when the agency pitched against fierce competition for the Guinness account — a Holy Grail of advertising, worth some £30 million a year. Creative teams were told to closet themselves away and come up with original ideas: Monge and a copywriter colleague, Mark Wenek, opted for the Savoy, where they were effectively confined to their room because their ad-men’s casual garb failed to meet the hotel’s dress code.
In the early hours of their third day there, Wenek pencilled “Genius” on a piece of paper. The duo worked all night on a theme that evolved into “Guinness: Pure Genius” — and rushed to present it to their boss, who declared “You’ve cracked it!” Among Monge’s visual developments was a futuristic world in which the creamy stout appeared as a regenerative force: when a pint was knocked over life began to die, but as the glass was refilled, everything reawakened. A later series featured the Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, best known for his role in the 1982 sci-fi epic Blade Runner.
Monge was a charismatic leader who brought out the best in his staff. A man of famously few words and what one colleague called “Steve McQueen cool”, he signalled deep thought by placing his left arm on top of his head to scratch his right eyebrow; disapproval by a frown and a sigh. “The less I speak the better I get,” he once explained. His creative instinct was unerring, and his work won many awards in a later career that encompassed stints for a succession of agencies in Sydney, Bangkok and Hong Kong.
He retired from advertising to pursue an ambition to create an English winery on his farm near East Grinstead in Sussex. Favourably positioned on the same latitude as the Champagne region and on the southfacing slope of a limestone ridge, the Chardonnay and Bacchus vines of Kingscote Estate produced this year, for the first time, three still whites — and days after Monge’s death came news that all three had won silver or bronze in the Decanter World Wine Awards. A sparkling wine is due to be launched this autumn.
The son of an RAF officer who later kept an antique shop — and great-grandson of a Norwegian herring importer who set up business in Hull — Christen Andrew Monge was born on Anglesey on April 6 1954. He was educated at Amesbury School in Hindhead, where he was head boy and victor ludorum, and Dauntsey’s School in Devizes, before going on to Manchester University to study Management Sciences.
As a student he had already decided he wanted to become an art director in advertising. “If I can’t,” he told a friend, “I’ll be a department-store window dresser or a thatcher, so that people can see what I have created.” After completing a master’s degree at Manchester he joined Collet Dickinson & Pearce in 1978, to work on accounts such as Hovis and Whitbread. He became an art director in 1980, and was part of a team responsible for Fosters lager advertisements featuring the actor Paul Hogan (the star of Crocodile Dundee) as an Aussie roughneck in London. Monge moved to Ogilvy & Mather, where besides Guinness he created memorable campaigns for Reebok and Irn Bru. He was posted in 1988 to the Sydney office as executive creative director and a member of the firm’s global creative council — securing a classic Jaguar sports car and a lime-green leather office sofa as part of his package. The sofa (on which he habitually took a lunchtime nap) moved with him as his career advanced, while later modes of transport included a Harley-Davidson and a convertible Rolls-Royce.
He was briefly with another firm in Australia before moving to Doyle Dane Bernbach in Hong Kong, Bates in Thailand, and back to Ogilvy in London, latterly in a special unit handling the Unilever account.
Meanwhile, he had inherited a fascination for antiques, bric-a-brac and historic houses. Having refurbished a remote village house in Hong Kong and a 15th-century house at Cranbrook in Kent, in 1998 he acquired a 14th-century timber-framed hall on the Gravetye estate between the Bluebell Railway and the Weir Wood reservoir in Sussex, together with 150 acres and fishing lakes.
But just as craftsmen were embarking on the restoration, Monge lost his job in London and found himself “within three weeks of bankruptcy”. Determined to “take what work I could find”, he returned to Bangkok and Hong Kong, latterly working for Leo Burnett.
A decade later he and his wife were finally able to focus on the vineyard project — as the central element of what Monge described as a “food and drink education” enterprise which also included a cider orchard and a cookery school.
Christen Monge married Alison Wade-Palmer, a former DJ with the Ministry of Sound, in 1999; she survives him with their three sons and a daughter. Christen Monge, born April 6 1954, died May 10 2015