2006 Bordeaux Futures Offers Are Arriving!
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Why Bordeaux?
What's the big deal about Bordeaux? Why should wine drinkers care about it?
Isn't the wine overpriced, the classification system impossible to understand,
its wine makers pompous and out of touch with the modern consumer?
Well, sometimes.
We love Bordeaux, we hate Bordeaux. We are confused by it and enticed by it.
And still some of our greatest experiences with wine, experiences that seem to
transport us past the ordinary, are with the wines of this one region of
France, Bordeaux.
Why? Why Bordeaux?
Bordeaux is the largest fine wine producing area in the world. Bordeaux as a
region is in almost a perfect geographic, geologic, climatic and historic
location to produce great wines. Lots of places produce great, extraordinary,
even brilliant wines – the US, Italy, Australia, other regions of France. But
they produce tiny amounts. Bordeaux has about 10,000 properties (chateaux) of
which around 200 produce over 100,000 cases each year of good to great wine.
By comparison, the Okanagon's Burrowing Owl winery produces about 25,000 cases
a year. The area planted to vine in Bordeaux is greater than the entire German
vineyard and about ten times the acreage of New Zealand.
So, Bordeaux produces a lot of wine – about 700 million bottles a year. Is it
all good? Well, yeah, the vast majority of it is good, year after year.
Excellent daily drinkable wines. A small percentage of it is great, the
benchmark of the world's wines.
Is it all expensive? Do you have to have a friendly bank manager to even look
in the Bordeaux section of the store? Nope. Lots of wonderful Bordeaux wines
are less than $30 a bottle.
OK, but with all those producers and all that wine how do I know what to look
for? How do I know what I will like? We at the cellar can help. Lots of other
knowledgeable wine folks can help. In the end your taste will decide.
Meanwhile here is a quick guide to the wines of Bordeaux.
What's it taste like?
Bordeaux makes three styles of wine – dry whites, sweet whites and dry reds.
The dry whites are the least well known here in Calgary. They can be great
bargains. The sweet whites are usually called Sauternes. They include Chateau
Y'quem, the richest, deepest, sweetest, yummiest wine on the planet. It is
also amazingly expensive, hundreds of dollars for a 375 ML bottle. Other
Sauternes are very reasonably priced. We offer several excellent Sauternes for
$20 - $30 a bottle. Lots of people are turned off of sweet wines because of
bad experiences we all had when we were young. When we grew up we thought we graduated from sweet wines. We should have just graduated from the bad junk we drank back then just to get drunk or just to get our dates drunk. Sweet wines can be some of the most enjoyable, memorable of all wine experiences. But demand for these wines are soft and so the prices of many are extremely
reasonable.
Now for the meat -- the dry reds of Bordeaux. Yes, there are lots of dry red
wines that come from Bordeaux. Hundreds of millions of bottles every year from
thousands of producers. Most every year they are pretty darn good and many
years they are exceptional.
What do they taste like?
With so many wines it is hard to generalize. Each
wine is unique and changes each year. They also change over time in the
bottle. They even change in the glass over the course of an evening. Amazing.
That variation is part of the joy of drinking wine. Some people say every
bottle is different, but that is a story for another day. You want the same
experience every time? Drink Coca-Cola or Bud lite.
Even though it is hard, let's try to generalize about what to expect from a
glass of red Bordeaux. In general Bordeaux reds show elegance and intensity
rather than massive fruit tastes. Bordeaux wines are almost always blends of
grapes and these blends fall into two broad general styles – Cabernet
Sauvignon based blends from the Left Bank and Merlot based blends from
Bordeaux's Right Bank.
The Cabernet Sauvignon based wines have great finesse. Their nose reveals
blackcurrant or violet character. They are tannic and firm in structure, yet
can be powerful and complex with long-lasting flavours.
The Merlot based wine can be soft, silky and opulent. They are often plummy
rich and spicy. Their silky-softness can make them quite sexy.
Left Bank? Right Bank? Now you trying to confuse me!
The French define the sides of a river by using right or left side as you face
downstream. If we used that system in Calgary it would work like this: The Bow
runs from West to East, from the Bow glacier in the Rockies to join the Oldman
River in the East. If you stand on an island on the river and face downstream
the Left Bank would be north Calgary and the Right Bank would be south
Calgary. Make sense?
We don't use that system but the French do. The Bordeaux region is divided by
two rivers and an estuary. Like the Bow they run from west to east, but they
start in France's central mountains and flow to the Atlantic Ocean.
On the Left Bank are areas such as Medoc and Graves. Left Bank means Cabernet
Sauvignon blends – firm and complex. On the Right Bank are areas such as St
Emillion and Pomerol. Right Bank – Merlot based, silky and sexy. There are
other areas but those are the biggies.
OK that should be enough to get me started but as long as you are explaining things, Mr Smarty-pants, what is this First Growth, Second Growth thing I hear about?
With so many producers and so many wines it makes sense to try to rank them
somehow. About 150 years ago for a World Exhibition in Paris Napoleon III
wanted to show off the wines of Bordeaux. He asked for the wines to be ranked.
The merchants and traders knew exactly what the wines were worth on the world
markets; they'd kept detailed records over decades. So in 1855 they drew up
rankings based on the prices. They made five lists for the red wines of the
Medoc and they also made lists for the sweet wines of Sauternes. The most
expensive wines they ranked as First Growths (Premiers Crus). The next most
expensive they listed as Second Growths (Deuxieme Crus). And so on down to
five lists. The merchants tried to ignore any red wines from outside of Medoc
but they could not ignore Chateau Haut-Brion of the Graves so they included it
as a First Growth.
150 years? A lot can change in 150 years. Is it still valid?
Yes, a lot can change and a lot has changed. Some of the higher ranked
chateaux are not making wines up to their ranking and other chateaux are
consistently over-achieving. Our job at the cellaris to dig out the good ones, the
ones that out-perform their ranking and are great wines at reasonable prices.
Yeah, I've heard of this futures thing. What's that about?
Because Bordeaux produces so much wine and is sold
in every wine consuming country in the world, a unique distribution system has
developed. Unlike other areas' wineries Bordeaux producers rarely employ their
own sales force. It would be crazy for 10,000 chateaux to each have sales
people for over a hundred different countries. Instead the Bordeaux wine
makers sell almost all their production to merchants (negotiants). The
merchants each have their own areas of expertise – Asia or supermarkets or
airlines or collectors, etc.
Most of the production is sold in advance of bottling in the spring following
harvest. So now we will be starting the 2006 futures campaign. This is
wine that was grown and harvested in 2006, is now in barrels at the wineries
and will be bottled and delivered in the spring of 2008.
The advantage to the consumer of buying futures is guaranteed supply at a
reasonable price, often far less then the price at release. The advantage to
the producer is stable cash flow to pay the huge cost of cellaring – those new
oak barrels cost upwards of $1,000 Canadian each, every year. But the producer
gives up the opportunity to sell at the full market price at the time of
release.
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