Monday, December 27 2010

Fools and Their Money?

Prune-eating readers of this blog (since I haven't been posting regularly, you're going to have to take care of yourselves) will have no doubt noticed a certain amount of populist sentiment on my part about wine prices. The cost of production of a bottle of wine varies based on technology applied, the  cost of crops (bunch thinning and winnowing at the picking table increase raw material costs) and such, but the cost of producing a bottle is in the end both finite and not stratospherically high. Where transgressively high wine prices come from is not an honest mark-up on a finite cost, but rather from artificially driven demand on a limited supply of product. While this is nice work if you can get it, at the end of the day it can often mean that when a winery figures out a gimmick to increase demand, they can get some 'stupid money' chasing a limited supply of their wine, driving the costs out of sight. I find this irritating.

A self-serving attitude? Well, of course. After all, Winexpert sells consumer winemaking products that allow you to make single-vineyard Hyper-Premium wines at five or six dollars a bottle, packaging included. But it goes back beyond that, way to the dawn of my own personal quest for wine knowledge, the early 1980's. I was learning about wine and the journey took me to some wonderful places. Back then we were getting great bottles of wine out of California, Australia, France, Germany and Italy, from prestigious producers, for the equivalent of a few hours pay--we lined up every year to buy a precious few bottles of first-growth Bordeaux and still had grocery money left over. We got a wine education that today is nearly priceless, because times changed, and as the economy boomed, a wine bubble developed--a great big bubble.

Partly it's Robert Parker's fault. He came along and rated the '82 vintage of Bordeaux the highest ever, with his dippy, worthless 100 point scale. After that, prices spiked to the moon, with people who didn't really drink wine jumping on the bandwagon with those who did, driving sales and prices at a rate never seen in history. People who wanted to look like they had taste would buy an '82 Petrus for a thousand or two thousand dollars, never mind that they couldn't appreciate it. I used to work in the trendiest restaurant in Vancouver and we got stockbrokers in who would order 'the most expensive wine you have'. When I explained that the Château d'Yquem was four thousand but wouldn't be a good choice for their meal, they'd wave me off and insist haughtily that it was their prerogative.

Now it's to the point where new world wines from producing countries like Argentina and Chile, and iconoclast wines from those willing to work outside of the old system in traditional countries and discard appellations (like Vinos Sin Ley, a favorite of mine) are the only option for people trying to educate their palates--I couldn't possibly afford to have tasted dozens of First-Growth Bordeaux and Premier Cru Burgundies, had I not done it 30 years ago. I'm not sure what beginning wine aficionado could, these days.

It was also partly the fault of increasing velocity of money in the world economy. Boom and bust cycles come and go, but there's always a boom somewhere, be it dot-com or oil sector or real estate. Fast money, once it finds a potential outlet for showing off, flows like water. I suppose this might make me seem an elitist, wanting only the truly 'worthy' to drink fabulous wine, but that's not really it. I was always grateful for the opportunity to drink wines beyond my palate, because I figured it was the only way for it to get better--drink the good stuff and then catch up to the taste as you can. And I'm not averse to people being able to spend their lucre in any way they like--I'm an Austrian-School believer, having studiously overcome a socialist upbringing. But stupid money irritates me in the worst way, and stupid money has been chasing wine for decades now. Once it was Heitz Martha's Vineyards (nice, if a little funky sometimes) and then it was Screaming Eagle (meh) whose cult status ensures that people on the list to get a bottle at $125 can instantly re-sell it for a thousand.

Now it turns out that Chateau Lafite 2008 is selling like the selliest wine in history in China. Lafite has been cultivating the Chinese market for the last decade. Never a bad strategy, working your brand in a strongly growing economy, and two things have served to boost the recent price and desirability of the wine. First, Parker rated the '08's at 98-100 points, ensuring that people whose purchase motivations can easily be manipulated by a number will be willing to pay more.

Second, in a rather cynical move, Lafite has embossed the Chinese character for 'Eight' on every bottle.

To cultural outsiders this may seem weird, but China has some very strong customs and beliefs. It would be easy for cultural absolutists to dismiss them as superstitions, but they're much more about the fabric of belief and the worldview of the Chinese than can be dismissed with an insensitive label. Some of the beliefs are as folkloric as anything western: where we are dismayed by spilling salt (I always toss some over my left shoulder to blind the devil) the Chinese think that building a house facing north will bring bad luck. Others are more deeply rooted symbolically, and very important, such as the idea that the number 4 (in Chinese, si – 四) is very unlucky because it sounds like the word for 'death' (si – 死). Contrariwise, the number 8 (ba – 八) will bring prosperity because it sounds like the word for wealth (fa – 发). Putting an 8 on the bottle is a genius-grade marketing move, but pretty transparent. It hasn't improved the wine, nor increased the cost of production, but it has driven the price over the moon, with wine that sold as futures at £2,000/case going for over £10,000/case in only a few months.

This makes me cranky. Not because I feel that the Chinese deserve the opportunity to enjoy the wine any less than anyone else, but because I highly suspect their motivation for desiring it, and condemn Lafite for catering to it. Is this stupid money? I sure feel like it is, but that's definitely cultural absolutism talking. Franz Boas was right when he said that "civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes". Despite my attempts to see it in a greater context, I can't get over the feeling that somehow the wine isn't getting its due--it's going to be collected, traded, obsessed over, hoarded, soliloquized, gifted and envied. What it probably isn't going to be, is drank by anyone.

And that's a dang shame. Wine is first and foremost a beverage of pleasure and sharing. Changing the dynamic of its desirability based on anything but hedonic pleasure makes it into something else that I don't want to participate in--not that I could, at those prices. 

I guess the only cure for my envy is to open a bottle of Stag's Leap Merlot (made myself for a minute fraction of £10,000/case, let me assure you) and drown my sorrows. Now there's a plan. If anyone would like to contribute to a fund to buy me a bottle of Lafite, please let me know. I'm sure that it would help as well.

Posted by Culturally Relative Tim AT 10:30AM

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