Tightening our belts

One of my favourite meals is leftovers, so perhaps it is not so surprising that I view the current enforced general tightening of belts with relative equanimity. I can think of so many ways in which the world’s financial crisis may have a positive impact on the world of wine.

Even the most rapacious trader in fine wine must surely admit that prices for the likes of 2005 Bordeaux first growths, cult California Cabernets and trophy wines made elsewhere did reach ludicrous, unsustainable levels in the first half of 2008. I cannot be the only one to be pleased to see fine wine prices soften (see Fine wine prices droop, for example), and to know, on the brink of the 2008 primeur campaign, that Bordeaux is still awash with unsold 2007s (see this thread on our members' forum). Consumers are slowly starting to have the whip hand again at the top end of the wine market, and we can hope that the all-too-obvious trend towards treating fine wine as an investment and a trading commodity will be halted, for a few years anyway.

And if it will be some time before we again see fine wine buyers in an unseemly scramble for allocations of the most sought-after wines, I for one will rejoice. Call me idealistic certainly, but there really is quite enough good wine to go round for everyone to enjoy. Wineupmanship among those who do manage to bag their case of Clos des Papes 2007 is to me one of the least attractive aspects of connoisseurship. (Robinson Rule One: Run a mile from anyone who defines themselves by how many bottles they have in their cellar.)

At one stage last year it looked as though Asia might step in to pay the prices that Europeans and Americans were beginning to baulk at. Indeed it has sometimes seemed in recent months that some top French wine producers were spending more time courting new customers in Shanghai and Hong Kong than at home. But I am delighted to see that, as one might expect, Asian wine buyers may be newer to wine than some of their counterparts in Europe and America, but they are financially acute and are certainly not prepared to pay over the odds. As for Russia, another market in which so much hope has been invested by the world’s wine trade, all signs are now downwards. Even oligarchs, for a while some of the softest touches for the Bordeaux first growths and DRC burgundies, have been finding life a little less easy of late.

I am also pleased if our straitened times brings with it less encouragement to produce trophy wines and special cuvées to titillate those who have in the recent past sought out the most expensive baubles of the wine world. Time after time, from the southern Rhône to Argentina via St-Émilion, the Loire and McLaren Vale, I taste ‘regular’ bottlings next to their supposed luxury stablemates and prefer the less ambitious wine, the one not so tightly corseted in new oak that it is impossible for it to express its fruit and geographical provenance.

I can certainly see that if a particular vintage yields one parcel of fruit that has such an individual character that it seems a shame to lose it in a blend, then there may be some justification for bottling it separately in exceptional years. But when special bottlings are born out of cupidity or a marketing plan, they not only run the danger of robbing the regular bottling of some of its finest ingredients, they also tend to put an unsustainable burden on the wine in the question, straining to conform to an elevated price point, too often with the aid of dubious make-up such as additional hang time, unreasonably low yields, or heavily toasted new barrels.

Talking of new barrels makes me realise with hindsight just how much money, not to mention a significant proportion of the world’s precious forests, have been wastefully dedicated to winemaking. It was not long ago at all – the 1990s? – when wine producers in many developing wine regions almost defined their aspirations by how many brand new French oak barriques they had sitting in their cellars. For many new wineries the cooperage bill was the major expense, believed to be the vinous equivalent of a magic wand. Oceans of thin, embryonic, young-vine fruit was routinely submerged by harsh oak tannins from less-than-top-quality barrels. Meanwhile we blithely depleted the world’s resources of oak.

Today I sense that wine producers are very much more prudent with their use of new oak. In fact this trend was evident long before the credit crunch era as sensitive tasters became increasingly aware than new oak was no panacea. Today the trend is to using bigger and older oak. Barrels are much more likely to be used two or three times at the same top winery before being sent down the food chain to be used by a lowlier and poorer establishment. And the austerity material concrete has been coming back into fashion, I am delighted to say. More and more even top quality producers are realising that concrete can offer more constant temperatures than stainless steel, while using far less energy.

Our increasing awareness of the need to conserve energy, coupled with the global credit crunch, is also having a huge effect at the bottom end of the wine market. This is most obvious in terms of different forms of packaging and the point along the supply chain at which they are applied. For instance, in the UK, one of the world’s most enthusiastic wine importers, we are seeing an ever increasing proportion of wine that has been imported in bulk (so much cheaper in terms of oil use and transport costs) before being put into bottle or, increasingly, other forms of packaging, in Britain. And the overall trend, I am delighted to say, is towards lighter bottles. Huge amounts of ingenuity have gone into improving the quality and strength of lighter bottles. I hope that before long, wine producers all over the world will stop shipping heavy bottles both empty then full around the planet – although it is still extraordinary to me that even some of the most committed converts to sustainability in the vineyard are not yet aware of this issue.

And then there is champagne. It seems only a moment ago that the world seemed to be running out of the stuff. It is the speed with which things have changed that is so extraordinary about this period in history. Well before Christmas last year I tasted champagne for British Airways’ first class. For years we had been begging LVMH, fruitlessly, to submit samples of their top wines. This time both Krug and Dom Pérignon were among the wines we assessed blind – just as the week before the number of Australian reds submitted for the first class tender was well over 150 really very nice wines, as compared with barely 80 (less well-made) wines last time around. It’s not all doom and gloom for wine lovers. (Tasting notes on those Australian reds to follow.)