As the summer holidays approach for the great majority of the world's wine producers and salespersons, there seems no slackening of activity in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Here are just a few of the recent news titbits that have particularly intrigued me.
The Languedoc is in fair old turmoil (plus ça change) with demand for the most basic wine falling away now that the New World is awash with the popular international vine varieties. The commune of Aniane has turned its back on the chance to have Robert Mondavi of California invest millions of francs in putting it on the international map – and generally prices are still pretty moderate for the best wines of the Languedoc and Roussillon. The region is so fragmented that there are all sorts of producers breaking ranks to sell their wines far too cheaply. Mas Crémat springs immediately to mind but there are others (I'll write an article about them soon). One of the most successful relatively new négociants in the Languedoc, Domaines Virginie, has sold its merchant business to Castel, the giant French company that has been rumoured to be sniffing round the quirky British retail chain Oddbins, still looking for a new owner since Seagram put them in the shop window. For more information about buying or selling land in the Languedoc, try vignobles.investissment@libertysurf.fr
Mondavi meanwhile is really in the doldrums, the current wines being berated in print by both of the top American wine organs, the Wine Spectator and Robert Parker's Wine Advocate. A doomy profits forecast has recently been issued by the company, which has just spent a fortune on new winemaking facilities at its Oakville base. Seems that globe-trotting winemaker Tim Mondavi, engaged in joint ventures all over the place, is trying to inject Italian rigour and French elegance into his California wines. Maybe it's time to just settle down and listen to what the vines have to say. Father Robert Mondavi, one of the world's more youthful 88-year-olds, is sensibly concentrating on Copia, the ambitious new arts centre on the outskirts of the city of Napa.
Germany's attempt to go all trendy, dry and anglophone by devising two new categories (yeah, Germany was really short of wine categories before, wasn't it?) Classic and Selection has predictably fallen flat on its face. Why on earth we need rules specifying a minimum alcohol level (12 and 11.5 per cent in the Mosel for Classic and 12.2 for Selection) in Germany, just about the only wine-producing country in the world free of the pernicious supposition than alcohol equals quality, heaven only knows. And as for why the terms used are so obviously unGerman...? Remember Hochgewächs? Ursprungslage? Charta? It's not great rules, names and categories you need, boys, but great wines.
The great (and idiosyncratic) white winemaker Jean-Marie Guffens has made no secret of his ambitions in Chablis. These make great sense as to a certain extent he has been making more southerly white burgundies with Chablis steel and backbone for years under his labels Domaine Guffens-Heynen and that of his négociant Verget. Now a 6.5 million franc winery is being established in time for the 2001 vintage at Chitry in Chablis country in conjunction with Olivier Leflaive, another white wine négociant based in southern Burgundy. Much as I admire most of Guffens' and some of Olivier Leflaive's wines, I just cannot imagine this joint venture. Somehow Guffens is to cooperation as, in the words of one of my favourite observations of the 1970s, Intourist was to tourism.
Meanwhile, the generic outfit that represents the wine producers of Burgundy has announced that it has launched 'a five year action plan for higher wine quality'. Thoroughly laudable, but there are other French regions that spring to mind more immediately as being in need of such a campaign. Reading between the lines, it seems as though most of the money will be spent monitoring suspicious-looking bottles in retail distribution and withdrawing them from sale if they don't taste good enough. Bordeaux announced a similar plan for its much more voluminous soft underbelly a year or two back but it seems to me we have yet to reap the rewards.
The British wine trade magazine Harpers (revitalised under the editorship of Tim Atkin soon-to-be-MW) organised a debate at Vinexpo, in conjunction with Académie Amorim, the cork giant's attempt to gain academic respectability within the wine trade. At this event René Renou of the Loire, the current president of the INAO, France's guardian of the Appellation Contrôlée system, actually admitted that far too many of the ACs worked today as 'a form of protectionism and not a defence of the concept of terroir'. Now we all knew that, but to hear an important Frenchman say it really is something. Vinexpo sounded relatively lively this year (not that I regretted giving it and its traffic jams a miss) with lots of animosity about the virtues of brands and the iniquity of the French blanket ban on new plantings in an effort to drain the wine lake, while all their much more aggressive competitors are planting like billy-o. And a final stab in the back, front and side has come from Bordeaux's most garlanded chef-restaurateur, Jean-Marie Amat of the Relais et Châteaux hotel-restaurant St James (where someone I know stayed while being a cellar rat at Cheval Blanc...can you imagine?). He is opening a new restaurant, the Maison du Fleuve at Camblanes where, according to my colleague Roger Voss who lives near Bordeaux, only 10 per cent of the wines on the list will even be French and there will be just five wines from Bordeaux. Incroyable even a year ago, but the French are really up against it today – except for a few dozen Bordeaux château owners, of course.
