My question is one of wondering if the BDX market is primarily an ex-France one? If so, why?
Speaking very much in generalities, I get the sense that the French wine drinker doesn’t drink much BDX. Anyone have any thoughts if that is true? I just remember being in Paris last year and many of the restaurants had very little or no BDX on the menu. I don’t recall seeing anyone drinking it the whole trip. I remembered that the whole futures process was originally supported by the Brits, so it got me wondering were (and are) these wines made for a foreign palate in much the same way that the Sherry market developed in Spain?
Or, are these more special occasion wines for the French? Or, along the same lines, do the French consider wine such a ubiquitous beverage that BDX tends to be too expensive to drink on a routine basis?
Or, perhaps I’m mistaken in my assumptions and observations?
I would be interested to hear any thoughts on this subject.
Chris,
I was just looking at these numbers a couple of days ago as part of participating in another thread. I think the French actually drink a load of Bordeaux. http://www.bordeaux.com/Data/media/DP08_UK_Economie.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. The pie graph seems to indicate that 2/3 of Bordeaux stays in France and that half of that, or 1/3 of the total Bordeaux produced is sold through their super markets.
Yeah I was in France in August and saw a lot of BDX in the supermarkets. I was surprised however that everyone seemed to be drinking mainly rose. But it was hot and they start drinking at lunch.
There’s Bordeaux and there’s Bordeaux. If I recall correctly, Bordeaux produces more wine even than the Rhone, most if it cheap stuff destined mainly for the supermarkets of France and the rest of Northern Europe.
Dan – Where were you in France? Apart from Paris, the wine lists tend to be very local, so you generally won’t find a lot of Bordeaux on the lists in, say, Beaune or Avignon unless you’re in a very tony restaurant. Even in Paris, in moderately priced or simple restaurants, you’re as likely to find Loire, Burgundy, Rhone or Languedoc wines on the list as Bordeaux, I think.
Bordeaux assumed a much more prominent role outside France for historical and logistical reasons. Bordeaux had strong medieval ties to Britain, which controlled Aquitaine after the Normans conquered Britain in 1066 and maintained close ties to it for centuries before France was united. Bordeaux also had a huge shipping advantage because it could export its wines to Northern Europe by sea. Burgundy and Rhone wine didn’t its way to Britain in quantity until the railroads and canals were built in the nineteenth century, I believe. It was simply too expensive to ship those down the Rhone to Marseille and around through the Straights of Gibraltar.
By the time transport was no longer an issue, the British shippers were deeply tied to Bordeaux and Portugal, where the shipping routes were short. (Just think of the English and Irish names in Bordeaux and Portugal: Palmer, Talbot, Lynch, Barton, Croft, Dow, etc.)
The preeminent place that Bordeaux occupies in the scheme of things ultimately traces back to those historical and geographic facts.
Thanks for that comprehensive explanation! Where did you get this information? Do you have any broad reference I could read up on this subject? That all makes sense from what I saw in Paris last year.
Your observations are very accurate - not only for Paris, but for most all of France. When one is talking about top-growth Bdx, they are generally priced significantly higher in France than in the US - especially in Paris.
In Burgundy, buying mature/older vintages of the top wineries is very difficult as production is relatively small and the producers sell out most everything - keeping very little for their own cellars. The bigger producers in Bdx and Alsace, for example, keep comparatively more of the older stuff, and these are usually brought out when entertaining “more important” ITB guests (e.g., big US buyers, collectors, journalists/reviewers; some of them refer to this as “showbiz”).
Wine is their product, how they make their money, so they naturally will sell more to the markets willing to pay more (e.g., Japan, US and, more and more, China) than the French.
The French are, in my experience (I have many French friends and I spend time in France whenever I can), a generally thrifty lot and I perceive that, since wine is so deep in their culture, it is “not as big a thing” to them as to others. Consequently, paying a lot for “trophy” or otherwise highly rated bottles is not common there at all. Actually, I don’t recall ever meeting/talking with anyone there about Parker scores unless it is lamenting the “Parkerization effect” on producing wines.
Again, in my experience, in good Parisian restaurants (and other areas), if one looks around and sees top growth Bdx or Burgundy bottles on the table, much more often than not, they will be on the tables of foreigners (mostly Japanese, Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Americans).
When it comes to cru bourgeois and unclassified growths, these one will see even in groceries (as someone mentioned above) and are more commonly/readily consumed in France.
An interesting anecdote is that one of my good friends, a château owner in Margaux who halves his time between France and the Philippines/Asia, told me that in Bdx, they (i.e., château owners) do not often serve their grand vin even to each other (since they’d rather sell them to the US markets), much less often the old stuff. Thus, the best/mature/old wines he has had were in Asia (specifically, with our little group in Manila and when in HK and Singapore on business).
Amusingly, when I wrote one magazine article featuring mature top Bdx growths we have enjoyed in Manila, he sent his friends in Bdx some of the magazines to show them what we drink here on a somewhat regular basis.
I just kind of absorbed it over the years, being interested in both wine and history.
I don’t own them, but I believe that both Hugh Johnson’s The Story of Wine and Edmund Penning Roswell’s Wines of Bordeaux (out of print, I think, but available on Amazon) cover the commercial history of wine. Clive Coates’ Bordeaux book has a brief history, which adds that the Dutch for a while competed with the British as the leading distributors of Bordeaux, selling it to the Baltic states and Scandinavia at a time when Britain was down on the French.
One other thing I would add is that Bordeaux is fundamentally different from the other wine growing parts of France in that the properties were comparatively large even several centuries ago and the top properties were controlled by merchants. What became the first growths were already marketed as brands in Britain in the 1700s – some of the earliest luxury brands, I guess you could say.
In Burgundy, by contrast, the monastic orders owned much of the best land until the Church’s property was confiscated after the French Revolution and given to the peasants circa 1790. In the Rhone, where apart from Hermitage the wines were not particularly valued outside the region, winemaking was something for peasants.
The economic and sociological differences are quite apparent even today when you visit the areas. The wealthy Bordelaise vineyard owners built themselves grand chateaux and the proprietors are unmistakably patrician when you meet them today, or the properties are owned by big companies (e.g., the French insurer AXA owns Pichon Baron, and the luxury goods company LVMH owns d’Yquem). By contrast, in the Rhone and Burgundy (with a few exceptions such as DRC and Meo-Camuzet, whose owners are from the upper classes), most of the owners are fundamentally people of the land.
I would like to confirm just about everything Tad Ermitano says.
In answer to the specific question, I am a student and a lover of Bordeaux, an American married to an Englishwoman, who has lived in Bordeaux since 1978.
The link between Bordeaux and Britain is especially strong, dating back to the time when Eleanor of Aquitaine married the future king of England, Henry the Second in 1152.
Southwest France owed allegiance to the English crown for three centuries thereafter.
The wine trade owes much to the English and Irish, going back as far as the Middle Ages.
And the English have long been willing to pay the price for top quality wines, the “New French Clarets”, precursors of today’s famous great growths.
The world’s main auction houses for great Bordeaux are in London, and the best books on the subject have been written by Englishmen and an American from Monkton, Marlyand .
Sadly, the English speaking world equates Bordeaux with great growths. This means that many of the excellent, affordable wines go by the wayside. It’s a vicious circle: the wines don’t get imported because there’s no demand, and there’s no demand because the wines aren’t available… I confirm that you can find really good Bordeaux at 6 or 8 euros a bottle, even if wine writers tend to know very little about them, and it is so much easier to zero in on the great growths (about 5% of production)…
The Bordelais in the wine business all speak good English, and there is even a kind of “anglomania” among members of the wine trade and their children.
Relations with the US are also strong, less so than with the UK due to the greater distance and the fact that it is harder for a French person to go to live and work there.
Some of the great wine châteaux are English or American owned but, contrary to what many people think here, they represent only a very tiny minority.
I’m Noel Ermitaño, though, Tad Ermitaño (the video artist/writer/short film maker) is my older brother. Maybe you have seen some of his short films? Canal+ contracted the right to show them in France as well as in a few other European and African countries a little over a year ago.
Please excuse my mistake. I saw the 3 letters “LMD” and couldn’t figure out what your correct first name was. So, I googled your last name and saw your brother’s name, no less on a food and wine site, and so figured it must be you.
I have been tempted to jump in here and display my erudition but it seems there is more than enough erudition to go around already. Fine to see some of the best read wine board posters here – I recognize Noel from when I was on WCWN some years back and Alex from other boards.
At any rate I may have missed it but I don’t know that anyone has gone into the importance of Eleanor of Aquitaine? She married a man who became the King of England some 850 years ago, and that made Bordeaux a “domestic” wine for the English (and thus we have “Claret”). One thing I didn’t know before reading the various Wikis – Guiana seems to be named for the Bordeaux region (Guyenne is an alternative to Aquitaine).
Great information for me here and I thank all of you for contributing! I am learning enough to know I want to learn more.
Now, as an opinion and generalization, here is a question: Do the French not drink more upper end Bordeaux because of expense or it just doesn’t match their palate and food as well as other regions? If expense is the primary motivator away from Bordeaux, I would think that with the expense of Burgundy, the same would hold true there too?
I love learning the historical evolution of cultural items like this!
Up-market Bordeaux costs a bomb, as you have surely discovered for yourself by now, and then you have to wait years for it to come around…
Only crazy foreigners (especially Americans . buy the likes of Pétrus and Lafite Rothschild.
The French attitude is that wine is a food, and part of their culture. No great shakes or special event. Therefore, if “wine” as an anonymous commodity costing 2 or 3 euros a bottle, they are willing to buy 5 or 10 for a wine of origin of better quality.
But from there, they think that only a madman (or a Texan) would pay 300 or 3,000 dollars for a bottle.
The French are not as terribly vintge conscious as many foreigners. They’ll gladly buy the so-called “off years” that foreigners turn their noses up at.
The French public is unfortunately pretty ignorant about wine, but they have a very natural approach to it.
To follow on from Alex… It was not uncommon for wine lists to simply list an appellation (say, Nuits St. Georges) without a producer or vintage, let alone a vineyard. Wine wasn’t worshipped in quite the same way as it was in the importing countries.
Frank – You’ve firmly established your erudition credentials. How enlightening! The G/W cognates are a personal favorite of mine, but I’d never known that one.
Did you know that Gaul and Wales are cognates, and are also cognates with Galicia, the same name for regions in Spain, the Czech Republic and Turkey? They were all derived from the word for Celt.
The Norman and Bretagne dialects that the Normans brought to England in 1066 substituted W for the initial G used in other French dialects and other Latin languages. Thus, thanks to the Normans’ deviant pronunciation, guerre in French ended up as war in English, and Guillaume as William. It also explains the curiously close, parallel G and W words we have in English such as warden and guardian and guaranty and warranty. They represent the Norman and mainstream French variants of the same word which assumed slightly different meanings in English.
But enough erudition and enough digression…
Say, we could really use an Wine and Etymology forum around here, couldn’t we?
One of my favorite stories from Hugh Johnson’s old book “Wine” – he was traveling in Bordeaux and he went into a roadside café for a meal. At a nearby table were some rough and ready French truck drivers quaffing some low end Bordeaux with their meal. For some reason Johnson had a few bottles of Montrose in the car and in a sudden burst of generosity, he walked over to their table and gave them a bottle. He gives a great description of the light dawning on their faces when they see the potential of this wine that they have been taking for granted for years. And a good Bordeaux can be a revelation.
Just a bit of added trivia for those who may not know, but Eleanor’s son with King Henry II, i.e., Richard I, was none other than Richard Coeur-de-Lion, a.k.a., King Richard the Lionheart. The Lionheart, though, king of England, was a Frenchman through and through. My wife, who knows much more history than I, told me that the Lionheart didn’t even speak English.
I visited Eleanor and Richard’s (as well as Henry II’s) original “tomb” in the Fontevraud Abbey in mid-2006. Very interesting place. Their remains are no longer really there, though it is said those remain buried in some secret place within abbey grounds. I don’t really know about that - I just figure that is said to add to the historic feel and attraction. Still, it is well worth a visit if one is in the area.
In my perception, it is the expense, and, yes, it holds true in Burgundy, as well as in any other region as regards expensive wine. We are talking about the people as the whole, of course, as the same thing could be said of any other country. Not everyone buys the top growths often or at all - not even those who can easily afford them - that makes for a very small percentage as regards a country’s population.
In the microcosm of Manila, I have friends with hundreds of times whatever little money I have and they think I’m a little crazy buying the wines I do. Even on this board itself, undeniably opulated by wine aficionados, I do not see top growths being opened by everyone or very often - and it’s usually the “usual suspects” posting the tasting notes of the top growths, mature or otherwise, their own bottles or somebody else’s.
I see it as very simple: whatever country one looks at, the minority have the readily available funds to buy expensive wine, and, of that minority, even fewer choose to - and of those, not everyone does it all the time.
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. buy the likes of Pétrus and Lafite Rothschild.