Prices on Bordeaux 2010? of course we're not worried

The wine trade’s been remarkably silent on the subject of price this year.

Since 1750 it’s been an article of faith that the British wine merchants will hyperventilate when they get on the subject of en primeur release prices.

Stephen Browett at Farr Vintners usually leads the charge. He even threatened to boycott the campaign if the chateaux didn’t promise to reduce prices on the 2008 vintage. Adam Brett Smith at Corneys will put a note online – a very polite suggestion that they just won’t be able to sell the stuff if it’s too pricey. BBR’s Simon Staples lets his feelings be known. The smaller merchants squeak a bit (but not so much as to endanger their allocations).

Then the negociants in Bordeaux pitch in. But this year, not a peep.

It’s China which has done it. Until the bubble bursts, Bordeaux, at the top end, is simply not going to produce an off-vintage again. The first growths and their siblings – a dozen or so properties – will sell their wine whatever happens. The Chinese buy by brand, not by vintage.

‘There is a consensus in the wine trade that it is very unlikely that prices will come down on last year, and likely that they will stay the same,’ Jean-Guillaume Prats at Cos d’Estournel says.

He also says that if there’s an increase, it will ‘probably be accepted’.

Why aren’t the merchants howling? Because they’re making an awful lot of money. Farr sold £62m of Bordeaux last year, a third of it to the Far East. Berry’s sold £110m.

They hardly had to pick up their blackberries to do it, and the 08s and a dozen other vintages are flying off the shelves on the back of the 09.

Of course the merchants aren’t complaining about release prices – why worry, when you can flog it all to China at any price you care to mention.

Bordeaux 2010: they just can't believe their luck...

Jubilant is the word. If you’d been parachuted into the En Primeur opening party at Smith Haut Lafitte last night, you would have thought something had been slipped into the wine.

The chateau owners have thrown off the faux-sheepish mood they’ve worn for the last couple of months and are now openly celebrating what they assure us is another superb vintage.

In September, when the grapes started coming in, if you asked a chateau owner what the 2010 was like they’d shrug and say they were embarrassed to say it after 09, but the signs were it was looking really very good…

There’s no such restraint now. In the cellars at the Smith party, the always affable Patrick Maroteaux of Branaire Ducru looked as if he’d just won the lottery (which in a sense he has). ‘Fabulous,’ he kept saying, and bent my ear for five minutes on the great growing season, its hot dry days and cool nights. 

The weather gods simply can’t stop smiling down on Bordeaux. They arranged a superb growing season, and now for En Primeur it’s gorgeous, 25 degrees yesterday, the same today, fragrant wisteria blooming on the warm honeyed stone of the chateau walls… under these conditions a glass of blush Zinfandel would taste like cru classe.

‘I was unsure up to about 2 weeks ago – the tannins seemed a bit harsh and I was worried the press would find it unapproachable,’ Anthony Barton, the venerable owner of Leoville Barton told me yesterday. ‘But now I’m pleased – there’s no aggressivity, there’s acidity and freshness…’

Barton’s worried that many journalists don’t know how to taste young Bordeaux (there’s a rumour going round that James Molesworth, the new Wine Spectator Bordeaux critic, hasn’t quite got the barrel experience yet, but more of him, and his former colleague James Suckling, later).

So Barton’s delighted that his wine is so pretty. I tasted it yesterday, and it is delicious – perfumed, with lovely acid and nice grippy tannins, fresh and very fine. 13% alcohol (Barton’s harvest was one of his earliest – he’s not one to let the grapes hang).

But above all it’s approachable and comprehensible.

The press is going to love this vintage, everybody hopes. We’ll see as the week goes on but the first signs are good.

And James Suckling kicks over the hornet’s nest…

Back to Suckling, who would be twirling his moustache, if he had one, and chuckling evilly. He’s the villain of the piece - he broke the Union des Grands Crus embargo and published his notes early.

Michel Bettane, France’s eminence grise and general grand fromage, threatened to boycott en primeur if the UGC didn’t put a stop to riffraff like Suckling refusing to play the game.

Others weighed in. There were murmurs of ‘ce n’est pas le cricket’. He’s abused the trust of the chateaux, someone said.

Suckling of course is delighted by all this, and came out fighting. ‘I don't see the problem,’ he told Decanter.com. ‘Does TF1 bitch to the BBC or CNN when they get scooped? The 2010 vintage is a great one. The weather has been fabulous. I hope it's the same next week for the others.'

To say he’s opened up a can of worms is an understatement. There are over 30 comments on Decanter.com’s article, posted last week –  and they’re not talking about the morality of breaking embargoes.

No – the comments are all about the point of scoring wines in the first place, the validity of those scores on wines tasted so young, and how the perfidious wine trade stitches up the press.

As Christie’s wine consultant Anthony Hanson MW writes, ‘Is there any other field of activity in the worlds of commerce or art where the producers, traders or artists have so successfully manipulated the media to pump up prices ahead of the products being put on the market?’

I don’t think it’s that naïve to think that the chateaux are quite within their rights to use critics’ scores as they see fit. It’s really no more immoral than a film distributor using favourable quotes on a poster, a good few weeks before the film is released.

Slander!

I hardly ever google myself (it makes you go blind) but did last night and found some of the most splendid abuse - a bloke called Bill Klapp calling me an 'effete douche bag' for, of all things, my pronunciation of Piedmont, which he says should be pronounced Piemonte, a la Italian. His boeuf seems to be it's British arrogance to anglicise foreign place names, so he makes a point of saying 'Venezia' instead of Venice:

'Since I spend half of my time in Italy, speaking primarily to Italian friends in Italian, it is no surprise that I would use Italian words. However, with Americans who clearly would not know what "Venezia" is, I try to educate them by saying "Venezia, you know, Venice" or words to that effect.'

Presumably he castigates his Italian friends for saying Inghilterra instead of 'England'? How I would love to be at one of his soirees.

But a question for you, 'Bill'. How do you pronounce niche? Aha! I thought so! it's a French word, my friend, so less of that post-colonial 'nitch' nonsense.

Honestly. It's poor sport really. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Anyway - here it is - I'm only doing it so I get a link back, you understand.
http://winetalk.com/forum/showthread.php?9722-I-Am-Sorry-but-Adam-Lechmere-Editor-of-Decanter-is...&p=81234

After Oddbins, Bordeaux 2010

I won't mourn the passing of Oddbins, in much the same way I don't mourn the demise of my mother's cat, Dracula, a splendid black beast of of formidable killing power, who ended life incontinent and smelling of damp. His time had come, much like Oddbins'. The London Bridge branch definitely smelt mouldy a couple of weeks ago, as if there were a body under the floorboards.

Possibly there will be, if the disgruntled employees of the once-much-loved chain get their hands on the management after Decanter.com's revelations of what certainly needs explanation even if it's not skulduggery: the payment by managing director Simon Baile to marketing director Martin West of just over £17,000 for 'redundancy'.

This was on 8 March, after Oddbins had started talks with corporate advisers Spectrum to find a way to deal with debts of over £20m.They must have had an inkling they were headed down the tubes - everybody else did. If I had a quid for every time Oddbins was described as 'beleagured' or 'embattled' or, lately, 'stricken', I'd be a rich man. What were they doing paying out five-figure sums to directors when they hadn't paid their suppliers for months?

Creditors coming out of the meeting last Thursday when HM Revenue and Customs delivered the coup de grace (they are owed £8m) found the whole thing fishy. 'There's a lot about it I don't understand - some things don't stack up', one highly-placed figure told me, hinting that there was an awful lot more to come out about the relationship between Ex-Cellar, the company set up by Baile and his partner Henry Young to buy Oddbins from Castel (who own the charmless Nicolas stores and who had done so much to ruin the chain).

Creditors were also outspoken about Oddbins' failure to communicate with them... I found the same - when we asked the management to comment on this £17k payment to West, we were told we'd got our facts wrong. Then we produced a copy of the receipt, signed and dated, and we were told it was a ‘contractual compromise agreement’. No idea why it was called a redundancy payment on the receipt.

Anyway, it's very sad for the 400-odd employees who have lost their jobs, but as for the passing of a shop that was once a byword for innovation, quirkiness and charm, and lately had become surly, secretive and boring (not to mention smelling of damp), I'm not shedding much of a tear.

Off to Bordeaux for the 2010s tomorrow. They do things differently there... First stop the splendid Anthony Barton at Leoville Barton, who's always more than willing to talk the press... watch this space...