Since the greatly celebrated vintage of 1982, Bordeaux’s leading producers have enjoyed widespread growth to new markets, including Japan, China, and Eastern Europe, along with steadily rising prices.
With increased capital infusions, the leading chateaux have undergone extensive renovation. Some have altered their style to conform to the taste preferences of leading critics, especially Robert J. Parker Jr., who apparently prefers big, plush flavors to the tight, cranky tannins of traditional Bordeaux wines. Other producers have deliberately chosen to retain the more challenging and complex traditional style while taking advantage of those innovations that accentuate the wine’s authenticity.
A recent Wine Media Guild tasting of wines from the 2000 to 2007 vintages of two important Bordeaux producers, Domaine de Chevalier and Chateau Haut-Bailly (from the Pessac Leognan area), illustrated the latter. Haut-Bailly’s owner, Robert Wilmers, told the assembled journalists, “Make a big wine? Over my dead body!”
Domaine de Chevalier’s owner, Olivier Bernard, concurred, saying wine should be “never too much but always enough. It’s easy to make big wine, but hard to make fine wine.”
Making an analogy to the jammy, high-alcohol “international” style of wine, Mr. Bernard noted that when his two sons started to listen to music, “they liked boom boom. When they got older, they liked more complexity. You need to have both in your life—talking about women, it’s the same.”
Groans were heard from a few of the female journalists present, who then excused the label’s owner (because he’s French).
I myself groaned at the mention of terroir, that impossible to pin down but ubiquitous term referring to a gestalt of soil, climate, tradition. It’s a term that’s getting as tired as the word “passion.” But Haut-Bailly’s cellar master, Gabriel Vialard, had a valid claim about the importance of the Haut-Bailly terroir, because it is truly distinctive: Four hectares of the vineyard were planted on a hillock of gravelly soils more than 100 years ago, surviving the outbreak of phylloxera that devastated most of Europe’s vineyards.
These vines are a mixture of varietals, including cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, carmenère, petit verdot and malbec, which ripen at different times and are picked over several weeks. A century ago, they would have been picked at once, ripe and unripe. As Mr. Vialard explained, “If you have a terroir with a story, you can follow ‘never too much.’ Is the name of the winemaker or of the chateau most important? Some winemakers try to follow their desire to show off and over-extract. We like to concentrate rather than extract. It’s not a race of body-building conditions.”
Mr. Bernard elaborated, “There is always a specific balance that is right for each year. Some people have made more than the balance and were very well paid for it—they’ve done more extraction, more oak, more merlot,” which is softer than cabernet sauvignon. “Extraction over the last 20 years was very well paid. I like to talk about natural concentration. Extraction is human—it’s artificial. I’m not happy with that. Extraction will mask the subtlety—extraction masks where the wine is from—terroir is gone, even if it was great.”
Certainly, the wines we tasted from both Domaine de Chevalier and Chateau Haut-Bailly demonstrated the virtues of these producers’ efforts to make subtle and complex wines. The 2001 Domaine de Chevalier Blanc, made from sauvignon blanc, was vibrant, nuanced, loaded with honeyed hazelnut and citrus flavors—a perfect representation of its gravel and sunshine.
The reds from both producers showed plenty of deep, concentrated flavors, with the finesse of well-tempered tannins. Haut-Bailly, in which cabernet sauvignon predominates, offered a clear example of how important aging is for that challenging grape, as the earlier vintages were pure magic, and far more supple than the newer vintages.
In fact, all Bordeaux wines, even those made in a fruit-forward style, improve markedly with several years of bottle aging. Wine merchants have acknowledged the virtues of aging wine since the British created a market for fine Bordeaux in the 18th century. All of the best Bordeaux chateaux have for centuries sold their wines to negociants “en primeur,” before they have even been bottled, and easily a year before they can be sold to consumers.
But as I learned at this Wine Media Guild luncheon, the huge British wine and spirits conglomerate Diageo, whose Chateau and Estates division controlled 60 percent of all Bordeaux imports to the United States, with more than $100 million (some say $200 million) in inventory, has recently announced that they will no longer buy Bordeaux. They are dumping their existing Bordeaux on the market.
The story goes that, under new management, the accountants at Diageo superceded the sales staff who understood wine there. Used to dealing with distilled beverages, which can be sold as soon as they reach the warehouse, the Diageo execs examined the risk in dealing with wine futures and said, “We’re out!”
You can imagine the shock waves this policy has sent through the wine industry. Bordeaux was the benchmark for the best wines of the world. The consumer will find some great deals, but it is hard to see how the quality standards achieved with the affluence of the past two decades will be sustained. The Bordeaux meltdown may affect our local wineries’ ability to sell into the flooded Manhattan market.
Still, Haut-Bailly’s owner, the American banker Robert Wilmers, is sanguine about the situation, saying, “The American system adapts at any time to change. It’s the greatest thing about our country—the market must be free.”
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