Monday, December 8 2008
Champagne Flat!
Oh, the humanity!
Just a couple of months ago the unbounded greed of French winemakers in the Champange region of France was on display for all to see. With ever-increasing demand for bubbly, they lobbied the INAO to expand the boundaries of 'Champagne' to include land previously on the basis of 'quality'.
Really, the previous exclusions were done to maintain pricing on the monopolised name of Champagne. As demand was peaking, all possible land was planted, and profits were becoming swoon-worthy. The Syndicat General des Vignerons (SGV) strongly favoured an expansion of as much as 40,000 acres of new planting, apparently at the behest of some of the big champagne houses so they could cash in on unbridled demand and a hot world economy.
I know I'm a cynic, and a lot of my blogs are about wine shenannigans, but this is really quite beyond the pale. They were about to do this once before, in the late '80s, but gave up on it when demand slumped in the early '90s. Now they've gone and done it, adding forty villages to the appellation, while simultaneously suing anyone who puts the 'C' word on a bottle of sparkling wine, claiming that champagne could only come from that tightly controlled bloc of land laid down in their rulebooks. It was the perfect time, given that exports to Russia were up 41% last year, and China's consumption was up almost 10-fold in the last few years.
But shipments are way down: according to Decanter Magazine they've dropped by as much as 10%. And now they're backtracking and sweating, because most Champagne exports ship in the last part of the year, for holiday and New Year celebrations. According to the Decanter article, prices are soft already:
UK supermarket Sainsbury's has slashed the price of six leading brands of Champagne to just £15 (US$22), with some - including Lanson Black Label, GH Mumm and Piper-Heidsieck – reduced by over £10 a bottle.
The funniest part of this whole thing for me is the comments from the folks behind this shenanniganacious episode. One of the most amusing volte-face comes from Charles Philipponnat, the president and GM of Champagne Philipponnat. In a Wine Pages article from September 2008 he said:
"From a quality point of view," he said, "we trust INAO experts will qualify parcels just as good as, or better even than, those in the neighbouring villages. To be realistic, we expect little grand or premier cru land to be created, but the new areas should easily be capable of producing decent non-vintage material"
Compare and contrast to his statement in the Decanter article:
"We hope that the brutal cooling down of the Champagne economy will make the grape market healthier and stop growers bottling excess production, encouraging them to sell more of their grapes to the houses that "add value". It may be painful in the short-term but this will good for the future of Champagne, for quality and for consumers."
Wow, he must have really well developed neck muscles from talking out of both sides of his mouth. Cynical, cynical, cynical. I haven't had a bottle of French Champagne in a year, drinking a lot of Cava from Spain and Sekt from Germany, and quite a bit of California bubbly (Gloria Ferrer is my secret crush). I really hope this price fallback works its way down to consumers in my neck of the woods. There's an awful lot of Veblen economics and scarcity pricing built into the price of sparkling wine today, and a bit of a shake-out will do consumers a world of good.
And I'll drink to that.
And don't skimp on the paté!
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