When will we see First Growth "spoofilation?"

[Jeff_Leve]

@Chris Seiber

I always enjoy and learn from your posts about Bordeaux, Jeff. Thanks again.

Have you tried any of those standalone chardonnays? I have always figured you could probably make at least good chardonnay in Bordeaux.

Again, if, say, Lafite could make a low 90s quality chardonnay under their label, even if it’s labeled Vin de France, I could easily see it selling for $100-150 or more a bottle, maybe a lot more.

I have had them all. There are notes on my site for each wine. They are fun and interesting, but the Sauv Blancs are better. The blends for du Tertre are quite interesting, using in 2016, 25% Chardonnay 25% Gros Manseng, 25% Viognier and 25% Sauvignon Blanc. In 2017, it was just Chardonnay and Viognier.


FWIW, until 1960, Lafite Rothschild did produce a Lafite Blanc, that was probably mostly Semillon. You can read a tasting note and see the label on my site. It is quite hard to find that wine today. Learn about Chateau Lafite Rothschild Pauillac, Complete Guide

[Jim_Brennan]

The cynic might suggest that Cos tossed up the 100 as a trial balloon, and just to CYA they market it as a charity effort.

[Rich_K0rz_nk0]

@Marcus Stanley

@Carlos Delpin

I would hold back a fraction of each vintage’s production and then release at the 10 year and 20 year anniversary. The bottles would have a different label certifying the provenance and the aging at chateau. Higher price for the same wine…

This is the way to go and they are already doing it, most notably at Latour. Guarantee provenance and take advantage of any auction escalation in prices since release. Crucially, allows you to manipulate the initial release price upward by reducing the supply.

I think the first growths long term ideal is something like – grand vin/flagship at $1,500/bottle with artificially maintained scarcity and periodic direct from chateau anniversary releases. Second wines at $300++ a bottle (like FGs used to be), in a tier clearly above super seconds. A long tail of associated third, fourth, fifth etc. wines (e.g. “Paulliac de Chateau Latour” etc.) that use the branding but offer different prices for different markets.

But it’s difficult to make this work in the face of the massive supply of Bordeaux from top chateau that are not FGs but can compete on quality in good years, and the difficulty in coordinating across multiple first growths. Classic problem of monopoly power being limited in the face of substitutes. I am priced out of the grand vin for first growths but wouldn’t buy a second wine – personally I don’t view the QPR for the second wine of a first growth as anything close to the QPR for the first wine of a good super second and I suspect there are many like me.

I think that this is spot on. Why diminish/dilute your flagship First Growth status by creating numerous top tier one offs that confuse and compete with each other. Create lower entry point vehicles that grab the mass market and as you astutely put it and that “allows you to manipulate the initial release price upward by reducing the supply” so their flagship will continue to increase due to basic principles of supply and demand.

[Julian_Marshall]

Actually you could say that Léoville-Las-Cases has done the most in this sense, since it used to produce 2 wines and now produces 4 from the same vineyard. Whereas Mouton and Lafite for example still produce 2 each. Whether or not Clos du Marquis has really improved that much from all this is probably debatable.

[Jim_Brennan]

I think you’ve hit the nail there Julian. They are a poster child for spoofing for points as well (e.g. - reverse osmosis).

[Eric_Ifune]

Just crank up the optical sorters and make the cut more stringent for only the most perfect of berries.

[Neal.Mollen]

Like many debates here, there appears to be a lack of consensus about what “spoof” means and that failure to define terms makes the resulting debate hard to follow. For some, it requires mega-purple or the like. Others just require 100% new oak. Does a severe selection process mean the wine is spoofed? Low yields? Alfert says a wine is spoofed if Rolland drove by the vineyards one time. Jim says reverse osmosis = spoof, and that may be, but I have never tasted an LLC that tasted spoofed to me in the slightest and, in fact, the most common complaint about the wine that I hear (other than its price) is that it takes forever to mature – hardly the hallmark of a spoofed wine from what I gather.

I think some people like to label anything modern as spoof, or one that is a higher priced wine created by an old brand (the OP, for example), or they try to assign the label to any wine they used to like but don’t any longer.

[Robert.A.Jr]

Spoof is like obscenity, hard to define, but you know it when you taste it.

[Julian_Marshall]

Good points, Neal. I was more reacting to the rebranding that LLC have done than the wines themselves. I certainly don’t believe for an instant that LLC is spoofy, just that they have succeeded in creating more from what they already had.

As to what spoofy means - well, for me, it’s high alcohol, high concentration, “luxury” heavily toasted oak and a dollop of mocha flavouring as a result. I suspect some say spoofy where they used to say Parkerised, because wines were often tailored for what people thought, rightly or wrongly, was his palate, in order to get those pesky points. I can think of lots of wines which fall into that category, but not LLC. The latter have just done an expert job of rebranding.

BTW - I forgot earlier - in fact LLC did use to have a third wine, called Terre de Lion or something similar. I spotted a couple sitting around when I visited LLC fifteen years ago, but it wasn’t actually branded as being made by LLC I think. I also spotted the RO machine, which at the time they had used once and discarded.

[Jim_Brennan]

@Neal.Mollen

Like many debates here, there appears to be a lack of consensus about what “spoof” means and that failure to define terms makes the resulting debate hard to follow. For some, it requires mega-purple or the like. Others just require 100% new oak. Does a severe selection process mean the wine is spoofed? Low yields? Alfert says a wine is spoofed if Rolland drove by the vineyards one time. Jim says reverse osmosis = spoof, and that may be, but I have never tasted an LLC that tasted spoofed to me in the slightest and, in fact, the most common complaint about the wine that I hear (other than its price) is that it takes forever to mature – hardly the hallmark of a spoofed wine from what I gather.

I think some people like to label anything modern as spoof, or one that is a higher priced wine created by an old brand (the OP, for example), or they try to assign the label to any wine they used to like but don’t any longer.

The more sensible version of me would say that reverse osmosis is a vinification technique that correlates with a more (rather than less) interventionist approach to winemaking.

The troll in me would suggest that the reason you can’t detect that LLC is spoofed is that they’ve been progressively leveraging interventionist techniques for so long that no one knows what their wines would taste like without the spoof.