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En Primeur Madness
There is not a hotel bed to be had in Bordeaux just now. Hire cars have been booked for weeks; flights to Bordeaux are filled with journalists and wine traders. It’s the annual en primeur madness, a sort of three-ring circus. From the point of view of the chateaux owners and growers it is a campaign, with carefully orchestrated PR strategies; the hacks and merchants probably see it more as a battle. Is there anywhere else that would choose to do business like this?
The system by which the previous year’s wine is traded – in this case the 2010s– is a well-oiled one. First, people must be told how wonderful it is, so the wooing of journalists is paramount. During the first week of April 300 members of the media are welcomed to Bordeaux to taste. The Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux (UGC) calls upon its chateaux-owning members to lodge, wine and dine the ladies and gentlemen of the wine press.
The advantage, obviously, to the writer is that they won’t be running up a lot of expenses. But it is also that they will be thrown together with, hopefully, an interesting cross-section of the world’s press and not just hobnob with their cronies. Thus they can get useful background information; they may be billeted with wine-makers they don’t usually meet, some from lesser-known chateaux, and they will certainly learn something from this. On the other hand, it is hard to bite the hand that feeds you.
Most importantly, the UGC organizes group tastings of its members’ wines with the option to taste blind, an option not everyone takes up.
There is a lot of ground to cover – literally, the Medoc is some distance from St. Emilion for example - and the pace is quite cruel, even without conversation over the croissants, or socializing at lunches and dinners. There are those who opt out of free hospitality in order to preserve their energies for tasting, and crucially I suspect, their impartiality. I recently heard Jancis Robinson (Financial Times and her own influential website) swapping information with Ch’ng Poh Tiong (Decanter and The Wine Review, oldest wine publication in South-East Asia, Hong-Kong and China) about their preferred motels and take-away services. The lot of a wine journalist is not necessarily as glamorous as it sounds!
Michael Schuster, British commentator and lecturer, has a well-tried routine for surviving the rigors of en primeur season. Having made a wish list, he bucks the system, making his own way round the chateaux he wants to see, if possible tasting previous vintages for comparison. “I want to talk to the guy who has made the wines. Thirty years ago everyone tasted from cask; now there are more and more people and it has become a huge jamboree. It’s hard work if you do it properly,” he says. Staying with a local friend away from the hordes, he starts early, returning in late afternoon to write up his notes for The World of Fine Wine.
Of course some commentators are more equal than others. First, before it gets crowded, comes James Suckling, ex of the Wine Spectator, now with his own website. Robert Parker has his own slot for tasting in peace and quiet.
Hard on the heels of these writers, are buyers from across the globe – hence Bordeaux is currently fully booked. The in-house chefs must be working overtime; outside caterers in their vans are hurtling between the vineyards. Specialist suppliers of foie gras, seafood and the best Paulliac lamb are at full stretch; Jean d’Alos, the Maitre Fromager near the city’s covered market, will have been working to bring his cheeses to perfection, as hosts serve their wines with menus that flatter them, or to put it the French way, les mettre en valeur.
You might think that traders would be welcomed with a red carpet –after all they are going to buy the vintage. In fact it is more like a test of endurance. Signing up with the UGC (this is more or less compulsory), given a badge and an allotted programme, they race from tasting to tasting. Wines are grouped in an area – for instance this year, at tiny Chateau La Pointe, all the Pomerols from members of the UGC - but conditions are difficult. “We are not offered the facility of tasting blind, seated at a table. You can hardly get to the spittoons – it’s a scrum,” one buyer told me, somewhat bitterly. As for the top chateaux, that’s a different ball game. Appointments to taste at the First Growths must be made at least a month ahead, and once they are booked up, neither love nor money will get you in. And if an appointment granted by one First Growth clashes with one at another, diplomacy will have to be your strong point. It may help if you have been visiting over many years, and taking up your allocation regularly.
Back in Bordeaux in the evenings, at restaurants like the famous La Tupina, (oh dear, those potatoes fried in goose fat on an open fire are to die for), anxious buyers can be seen swapping notes, working out how to taste at Chateaux X and finish in time to get to Chateaux Y, without impairing their judgment or killing themselves on the narrow roads.
Writers and traders are in a symbiotic relationship, but in the last few weeks it has emerged, via a thread on Jancis Robinson’s website, that some buyers get pretty fed up by the way influential journalists publish their notes before the chateaux have fixed their prices, with the obvious effect that can have.
There is an embargo on publishing notes before the official en primeur week. But guess what, it is sometimes ignored. Michel Bettane, doyen of French critics, is cross about this. He has also had a go at writers who think they are “supermen”, complaining that they “give a precise ranking on one short tasting, one sample, not after a complete tasting of the vintage.”
He has a point. What are the pundits tasting? Six months old wine is drawn from barrel into sample bottles. Naturally the growers choose a barrel showing best. In short, decisions are based on a snapshot of the vintage, not the full picture.
It’s amazing this arcane system works as well as it does.
Rosi Hanson
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