MONDAY JULY 6th 2009
France
For many people the wines of France are a global benchmark, with producers from all over the old and new worlds striving to imi-tate the great vignerons from the classic regions. Would there be Napa Cabernet without Bordeaux? Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc without the Loire? Barossa Shiraz without the Rhône? Nowhere in the world is there a greater variety of winemaking styles than in France and ever since the Phoenicians brought the vine to France thousands of years ago, the business of wine has been integral to the history and culture of this great gastronomic nation.
There are about 150,000 vineyard owners in France and collectively they vie with Italy as the largest wine producing nation in the world, making between 50-60 million hectolitres each year. Their share of the global market is immense, with French wine exports representing 35% of the total.
France is the birthplace of the Appellation system which has been imitated the world over as a means of guaranteeing the authen-ticity of the wine produced. AOC has also brought with it challenges however, as the strict frameworks governing what winemakers can and can’t do led to cheaper French wines being unable to compete with a wave of new world competitors. The expansion and improvement of the Vins de Pays system has revitalised the lower end of the French wine market and their wines are once again considered to be among the best in the world for both value and quality.
Tonight we will taste our way around the country, focusing on five of the most important regions and looking at their unique com-mercial environments.
Owning land or a winery in Champagne has long been a licence to print money, with the average price of a hectare of vines an astro-nomical €735,000. Amazingly, the world’s gold standard for sparkling wine comes from some of the most highly-cropped AOC vineyards in the country and the fruit is in such high demand that almost every grape is turned into wine.
The fight to source large volumes of good quality fruit has created a real divide in Champagne between the owners of the vineyards (growers) and the producers of the wine (Champagne houses). Tra-ditionally the power has rested with the major houses (Bollinger, Moet, Clicquot etc) thanks to their buying power and long standing relationships with the growers. Before the champagne boom of the 90s the houses had enough power to keep the grape prices low and monopolise the best fruit, but the past two decades has seen a lot of changes in the business landscape. During this time many of the growers have begun to bottle wine under their own labels, going against the conventional wisdom that said ‘blending is best’ and bottling cuvées from single vineyards or small landholdings. Many of these have attained cult status and producers like Jacques Selosse and Egly-Ouriet are now charging prices that reflect the artisanal nature and global reputations of their wines. Almost all of the major houses own a certain amount of their own vines but, with the exception of Louis Roederer, this is never enough to fulfill even half of their requirements. With global demand for Champagne still bouyant and the growers now bottling around 25% of all champagne sold, the price of fruit has accelerated in the last few years and this has been reflected in a string of price increases that show no sign of abating.
The recent decision to upgrade a large amount of periph-eral vineyards to AOC land should go some way to eas-ing the current price pressure, although these vines will not be planted until the new boundaries are confirmed in 2014. With the time needed for new vines to yield fruit and for the wine to be made, the new areas will not be in use until at least 2020.
Questions remain about the suitability of these new ar-eas and many respected commentators have expressed reservations about some of the sites that are due to be upgraded.
Tonight’s tasting will compare two wines. One is from leg-endary house Veuve Clicquot, a winery that has played an important role in the development of champagne produc-tion and whose yellow label cuvée is enjoyed throughout the world. The second wine is a grower champagne from Roger Pouillon and is a cuvée made from his best fruit in the 1er cru vineyards of Mareuil-sur-Aÿ.
Languedoc & Roussillon
For many years the southern regions of Languedoc and Roussillon were home to a great deal of France’s ‘wine lake’, making wine that nobody wanted to drink, let alone part with their hard earned francs for. The last decade has seen all of that change, and what was once the land of plonk is now one of the most exciting regions in the world of wine, with innovative vignerons producing both artisanal limited production cuvées and branded wines of vastly improved quality.
The stunning mountains, Cathar castles and medievil cities of Carcassone and Narbonne are the backdrop to the western half of the Languedoc, where much of the region’s AOC wines are made in famous appellations such as Minervois, Corbières and Coteaux du Languedoc. It is also home to Fitou, the oldest appellation in the region (1948) and Limoux, the home of Languedoc’s only AOC sparkling wine.
The Eastern Languedoc, with the bustling metropolis of Montpellier as its hub, borders the Rhône Valley to the North and Pro-vence to the East - influences that can be seen in both the grape varieties used and the landscape of the region.
Vineyard areas like Pic St Loup, St Chinian, Faugères and the region’s newest designated terroirs (Pézenas, Terrasses du Larzac and Grés de Montpellier) are full of producers that are pushing the boundries for quality wine in the area. When you add these to the Vins de Pays wines from the Herault (perhaps France’s best VdPs), this is a very exciting area.
The sun drenched Roussillon stretches down to the Pyrenees and the border with Spain, resplendent with rugged mountainous terrain and the azure waters of the Catalan coast. This region was traditionally associated with the rich and concentrated sweet wines of Maury and Banyuls and the sweet Muscats of Rivesaltes. The Cote de Roussillon Villages AOC produces most of the quality table wine from the region, although there are some very exciting up and coming VdP producers making spectacular wine from very very old vines.
These three sectors of the Languedoc & Roussillon region all have a common thread. They are a hotbed of innovation and devel-opment in the vineyard and winery, with a great deal of foreign investment and expertise arriving in the last decade to supplement a young generation of French vignerons that are committed to quality.
The Vin de Pays system (ratified in 1979) was established to allow greater freedom to winemakers in the assembling and marketing of their wines, in addition to freeing vast areas of vines from the curse of having to label their wines ‘Vin de Table’ because they were outside the designated AOC zones. The stringent AOC regulations that are in place to guarantee ‘typicité’have also created a system that doesn’t allow for adapting wines to match consumer trends and the VdP movement has been at the vanguard of modern French winemaking, allowing France to respond to the commercial threat that is posed by New World wines.
Tonight we will drink two benchmark wines from each side of the divide. An AOC Coteaux du Languedoc from the wonderful Chateau de la Negly, and a wine from the doyen of the VdP movement - the legendary Mas de Daumas Gassac.
Burgundy
Wine doesn’t get much more complex than in Burgundy - a place where the minutae of the various appellations, vineyards and producers are poured over for hours by wine geeks from across the globe. Nowhere in the world is the concept of ‘terroir’ better illustrated than in the procession of villages on the ‘Côte d’Or’, where in the space of a few rows of vines the price of a bottle of wine can jump a hundred-fold.
The differentiation between the myriad vineyards in each village dates back over 1000 years, when Cisterian monks from the ab-beys that owned the land built walls around many of the best sites (hence the name ‘Clos’ today for many a walled vineyard). Their knowledge of the different soils, aspects and climatic conditions of each site became well documented over the years and the top vineyards began to earn an international reputation for the wines they produced.
As with many aspects of French life, the revolutionary war of the late 18th century brought immense upheaval and the church was on the receiving end of the revolutionaries’ wrath. Churches were destroyed, religious orders disbanded and ecclesiastical lands were seized and sold off at auction to the highest bidder. This new class of Burgundian landowners began to sell their produce (either fruit or finished wine) to a burgeoning group of ‘Négociants’ that would blend and bottle the wines under their own name and sell them throughout France and Europe (where the Benelux countries were the biggest market).
These négociant houses, many of which still exist today, became firmly established in the 1800s as the source of all Burgundy wines. As the century drew to a close the commercial imperative of selling large volumes of ‘Beaune’ or ‘Gevrey Chambertin’ to customers all over the world had led to adulturation of many of the wines - Algerian red was often blended into the hideously overcropped and thin Burgundy wine to stretch it and add a little more body. This came about because everybody had got greedy, with the négociants paying for fruit by weight (resulting in the growers settling for high yields over high quality) and bottling sub-standard wine that traded only on the exalted reputation of the villages it (was said to have) come from.
The situation didn’t change dramatically until the 1930s, when American writer and importer Frank Shoonmaker was one of a cadre of international businessmen that persuaded some of the top estates (such as Marquis d’Angerville, Henri Gouges, Armand Rousseau etc) to begin bottling, labeling and selling their own wine. This sewed the seeds of a revolution (a benign one this time) which really got going in the 1970s when more and more small estates began ‘estate bottling’.
Today that has become the norm, although the once all-powerful négociant houses are still very much part of the picture. In order to make up for the tons of grapes that are no longer being sold to them, they have had to invest in their own vines and up the price they will pay growers for fruit and wine. The situation has led to a stunning increase in quality throughout Burgundy since WWII. Tonight we will taste two examples of Clos Vougeot Grand Cru - one from a négociant (Jadot) and one from a grower (Confuron-Cotédidot).
Rhône Valley
The Rhône Valley has one of the richest histories and most esteemed terroir of any wine region in the world, although perhaps it would be more accurate to call it two wine regions as the Southern and Northern halves have distinct personalities of their own. The Northern Rhône is most famous for the wines of Hermitage, said to be the first vineyard planted by the Greeks following their arrival back in 600BC. Today the hill is home to some of the country’s best vineyards and the wines made by JL Chave, Michel Chapoutier and the recently re-invigorated Paul Jaboulet are all iconic. The other Northern Rhône superstar is Côte-Rotie (the ‘roasted slope’), where producers like Etienne Guigal and René Rostaing make Syrah dominated wines to rival anything made anywhere else in the world.
In the South the majority of production is dominated by the wide reaching Côtes-du-Rhône Villages appellation, although the un-doubted superstar of the region is Châteauneuf-du-Pape - The birthplace of France’s appellation system (AOC) thanks to the work of Baron Le Roy of Château Fortia back in the 1930s. The wines of the Southern Rhône are dominated by the red grape Grenache, although a number of other varieties are planted and permitted - up to 13 grapes can be used in the blend for Châteauneuf-du-Pape!
While the wines of the Rhône have always been held in high regard locally and domestically in France, their international repute is a relatively recent phenomenon. Many people have put the global demand for the full-bodied and muscular red wines of the Rhône down to the wine critic Robert Parker, who has championed the various appellations and their leading producers ever since he started the Wine Advocate back in the late 1970s.
One of Parker’s favourite appellations is Côte-Rotie and in particular the single vineyard wines of Etienne Guigal. He has given Guigal more 100 point scores than any other producer in the world of wine and the result has been colossal demand for all of his cuvées.
The artisanal wines that are found throughout the region have also been a magnet for foreign wine merchants over the years, each one searching deeper than the last in order to discover the next big thing. While it certainly took some time for the French to warm up to the idea of dealing with haughty British and brash American wine buyers, there is no doubt that they have had a lasting effect on the sort of wines produced and the quality levels that they attain.
One such buyer is the American Kermit Lynch, who began importing wines from the Rhône into the US during the 70s. The rela-tionships that he established with top domaines such as Vieux Télégraphe and Jean-Louis Chave were instrumental in putting an end to the incessant fining and filtration that was stripping so many wines of their inimitable character.
Bordeaux
Wine and business go together in Bordeaux like nowhere else on earth. Today’s Bordeaux is the largest fine wine region in the world and the annual circus of the ‘En Primeur’ campaign is as much at home in the business press as it is in the wine press. Trad-ing in the wines of Bordeaux has created an international financial market with scores of companies and even an financial index (Liv-ex) established to service the constant movement of money and wine around the world.
Throughout the long history of Bordeaux, commerce in wine has been essential to the fabric of this Atlantic port. For hundreds of years the region of Aquitaine was fought over by the French and the British, with the Dutch on hand to stoke the fires of unrest if it would help them make some money.
The wine of the region has been held in high regard in Britain since the middle ages when it was owned by the British crown, but its reputation was assured once the De Pontac family dispatched their son to London with cases of Chateau Haut Brion (the family estate). Samuel Pepys recorded his enjoyment of the wine (which he called Ho’ Bryan) in his diaries back in 1663 and a legend was born.
The renown of Bordeaux wine, refered to as Claret on the English side of the channel, continued to grow throughout the centu-ries, although certain properties were held in higher esteem than others. The prime vineyards, situated on the gravelly mounds that line the left bank of the river Gironde, commanded prices that were far in excess of the other wines from surrounding vine-yards. In 1855 the merchants of Bordeaux were asked by Napoleon III to classify the vineyards into five quality based categories, in anticipation of the best being showcased at the impending ‘Exposition Universelle de Paris’. The 1855 classification was based on the prices charged at the time by the merchants for each wine and it remains in tact today, with only one exception to the original classification.
Since 1855, classification fever has swept through Bordeaux and there are now similar classifications for the wines of the Haut-Medoc that didn’t make it into the original, the sweet and dry wines of the Graves and the red wines of St Emilion. Controversy is never far away when there are reclassifications on the cards, as has been seen recently with the Cru Bourgouis and St Emilion classifications that had to be suspended pending legal challenges to the changes that were proposed.
The close links between wine and business in Bordeaux have ensured that properties don’t remain undervalued for long and in a market where demand is currently outstripping supply at the top end, the best wines have become the preserve of only the most wealthy drinkers.
Tonight we will taste wines from two of the classifications, a Cru Bourgouis from Chateau Haut-Marbuzet in St Estephe and the cream of the crop - a 1er Cru Classé from Pauillac, Chateau Mouton-Rothschild.
