Tuesday, February 5 2008
En Primeur: A Scam?
Ouch, that stings!
So if you've been following the saga of backlash against 'spoofulated' wines, or the backlash against the backlash, you might be wondering, 'Who is responsible for wines that taste like generic jam-and-vodka?'. Is it the sugarlogged palate of Robert Parker? Is it ex-cathedra pronouncements? Is it Promethian technology run amuck?
Nope, just market forces. Wine futures, the practice of buying wine before it's ready to bottle, has been around for hundreds of years. Merchants, going by the handle 'Negociants' used to buy barrels of Bordeaux, ship them to their shops, blend them (sometimes) add things to them (naughty, sometimes) and bottle them for sale. In recent years, however, consumers–especially a specific sort of very wealthy speculator-consumer–have been buying up future lots of Bordeaux for their own collections, enriching Negociant firms most royally.
Why would this make wine into a sorry mess of alcohol and jam, blandly tasteless and hideously disfigured? Because in the old days those merchants knew wine would evolve over time. The French even say that you don't buy wine for yourself: you buy it for your children, while drinking the wine of your father. But modern consumers want instant satiation, so they need wine that tastes like fruit pop and booze, right out of the barrel. Think that's implausible? Check out what Decanter Magazine has to say about En Primeur:
Former Chateau Petrus winemaker Jean-Claude Berrouet has become the latest high-profile wine professional to attack en primeur – calling it 'madness' and 'a disaster for wine'.
Writing in the March issue of Decanter magazine the now-retired Berrouet says the en primeur barrel tastings, held the year after the harvest in Bordeaux, are a bad influence on the wines of the region.
The wines have to be 'as seductive as possible far earlier, to the detriment of the Bordeaux style', he says.
Stephen Brooks is even less complimentary:
Bordeaux En Primeur is a con trick perpetrated on a gullible public by wine merchants, chateaux and journalists, wine writer Stephen Brook argues in the latest issue of Decanter magazine.
Brook lambasts the system whereby the world's press descends on Bordeaux every spring to taste the previous year's vintage.
It 'is primarily designed to transfer large amounts of cash from your pocket into the pockets of wealthy Bordeaux proprietors and merchants at the earliest possible moment,' he writes.
Finally he mocks the way wines that haven't yet been assembled are sold: it's like Karl Lagerfeld presenting a sketch to clients and saying, 'I haven't decided where to put the buttons, and I may change the colour, but you get the idea. Now please give me your money...' he says.
If you think he sounds bitter, even the (ever lovely and delightful) Jancis Robinson weighed in on En Primeur:
'Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to play this game?' she asked in an interview in June 2007. 'I hope 2006 will not be a success. I hope it will really show the Bordelais the shortcomings of the system.'
(Full disclosure: I've worked for the Oxford University Press, contributing to the Oxford Companion to Wine. The fair Ms. Robinson is the editor of that tome.)
There you have it. A historically high demand coupled with lots and lots of money searching for finite amounts of premium wine has moulded the market. Rich fools who can only taste something if it's as sweet as ketchup and as black as ink have beaten otherwise respectable wineries into submission with bales of cash, and every time the wine gets blander, the money gets bigger.
I'm hopeful that there's light at the end of the tunnel, and by this time next year I'll be able to step down from my soapbox and talk about all the great wine I like, not the wines I'm avoiding.
| Posted by Tim AT 9:26PM | 0 Comments |  |
Post A Comment |  |
 |