What Price Bordeaux?

by Benjamin Lewin MW

The last two decades have seen a revolution in Bordeaux. What Price Bordeaux? takes a novel approach in explaining the forces responsible for this change. The top châteaux have been obtaining unprecedented prices for their wines, while at the same time smaller chateau owners are going bankrupt. Enormous changes in the production and style of wine have been accomplished by advances in viticulture and vinification coupled with climatic changes. The battle between modernists and traditionalists plays out through the garage wines, felt by some to be the newest wave, and by others to be a caricature of Bordeaux. Pulling together information from a variety of sources including the market in Bordeaux, changing patterns of ownership, and new possibilities in viticulture and vinification, this book presents a unique overview of the forces making Bordeaux wine what it is today. The book considers the role of terroir, how events ranging from the phylloxera plague to global warming have changed the fundamental nature of Bordeaux, the mysteries of the en primeur system, the rising influence of oenologues and critics, the changing nature of the wine itself, and the rise and fall of various chateaux. A running theme is the powerful effect that the classification of 1855 continues to have on the chateaux of both Left and Right Banks, and this and the other classification systems are considered before concluding with a new classification of the châteaux based on the existing market.

Genres: Wine

292 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2009

Reviews

[Nick Stengel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lewin has written a book with a wealth of information and wonderful presentation of descriptive statistics. He is also a persuasive historian, going back to the beginning of the wine trade in Bordeaux that preceded wine production. In his narrative, he makes much of the trials and tribulations of the region seem reactionary and short sighted.

My one wish for the book, and I wished for it almost every page, was that Lewin was an economist. He's got all this great information that circumscribe important issues of the wine trade, but uses none of it in making any actual arguments. For example, he skewers the notion that the 1855 Classification was based on anything other than prevailing and historic prices for wine of the ranked chateaux. But then fails to connect the argument that pricing is a proxy for all the information the Bordelais supposedly failed to atten to: terroir, quality, etc. What a person is willing to pay for a product is an aggregation of all known information!

From his exhaustive narrative, it is clear that the Bordeaux wine trade is a train wreck of an economic market. Yet that does not preclude economic analytical tools from making sense of the morass. It's an excellent book and I wanted still more.