The current crisis is not the first severe crisis the vineyard has been through. It has seen others, alas, but each time it has known how to renew itself. Let us try to list the causes of the disaffection for our wines and the possible adaptations.
The taste of red wine consumers has clearly changed. The older generations, adepts of the “Parker taste”, appreciated very structured wines, spiced by the oak of new barrels and capable of long ageing in the cellar. The new generations rarely have an ageing cellar and look for softer, ready-to-drink wines with less alcohol, finding little interest in the taste of new oak.
One of the conceivable solutions to accompany this change would be to raise vineyard yields back to those obtained at the beginning of the 1980s, that is, above 50 hectolitres per hectare. We know the consequences: less powerful and softer wines, less suited to ageing in new barrels, lower in alcohol and to be drunk sooner. Characteristics that do not bother the modern consumer in the slightest, quite the contrary.
This solution — though not the only one — would also allow a better financial balance for properties, very timely in the current context, by lowering cost prices and reducing the barrel budget. Obviously it is not to be proposed for the most prestigious classified growths, whose reputation is based on the enchanting and inimitable aromas obtained through long cellar ageing.
The present era is marked by an appetite for sweet tastes and a rejection of bitterness which, however, made the success of old aperitifs now forgotten, such as the “amers” like Picon. Sweetening red wines would be a good way to meet this demand. It would bring more smoothness and softness to red Bordeaux, which are sometimes criticised for being too austere. The INAO very recently opened this possibility to red-wine AOPs. One feels like saying: “about time”, because our main foreign competitors have for ages been taking advantage of this opportunity to seduce the new generations of consumers.
Other solutions still exist. The work site is open. Time will separate the wheat from the chaff and the Bordeaux vineyard will pick itself up, as it always has.
To complete this editorial, you will be able to discover the various “reinventions” of Bordeaux since the 18th century, as well as an article by Mohamed Boudellal devoted to the current crisis affecting the Bordeaux vineyard. He will also introduce us to the world of white Médocs, the first bottles of which will reappear on our tables this very year, and will shed light on the great qualities of a little-known and under-used Bordeaux variety: Petit Verdot.
Yves Raymond
