Wine:Storms have wreaked havoc on Bordeaux vineyards - and prices
The gods of wine are a fickle bunch and history is littered with examples of the payback that nature demands for its bounty. The latest instance provides an interesting backdrop to this year's Bordeaux en primeur campaign, in which wines are bought many years in advance of delivery.
On Wednesday, June 22nd, a violent hailstorm destroyed over half of the Northern Rhône's Côte Rôtie harvest with nearly total destruction of fruit on the vines in some vineyards, according to reports in the wine media. Hailstones the size of "large marbles", according to locals, battered vineyards such as the elite properties of La Landonne and La Mouline. On the same night hail also hammered Alsace.
"Nearly the whole appellation is affected - 50 per cent of La Landonne and around 30 per cent of the Côte Blonde has been destroyed," says Jean-Paul Jamet of Domaine Jamet. A spokeswoman at Guigal says that on average the Côte Rôtie has lost 60 per cent of its fruit, though a full assessment had yet to be made.
The Côte Rôtie and Alsace setback is not the end of the story. As Jamet says, if the rest of the growing season goes as planned, they could have a good, if greatly reduced, harvest in the autumn. This would then be reflected in the price of the wine. For Côte Rôtie, as with top Bordeaux, is a collectors' wine, a wine as desired as it is limited. It is still, however, a disastrous vintage for the producers, whose income will suffer no matter how high the wine's price.
There are echoes in this to the argument that the Bordelais are using to defend their relatively high prices for the 2006 vintage, which generally show a small fall on the "once in a lifetime" 2005 vintage.
American and British critics, notably Jancis Robinson in a Berry Brothers podcast, have been strong in their denunciation of the high prices and indeed the whole en primeur system. But Bordeaux just shrugs its shoulders and says it is a free market, believing that the super-flush Russian and Asian markets will take up any slack - a belief yet to be tested.
Bordeaux has a premium product which attracts a premium price. So what if the loyal devotees of various châteaux cannot stomach the price - that is their problem. We have a business to run, say Bordeaux's elite, and we should make hay while the sun shines.
Hear the Robinson podcast via www.apple.com/itunes or www.bbr.com