Blog Article
Spring Wine Releases
Wine in Spring
At this time each year, about eight months after harvest, spring brings the eternal hope to wine that is otherwise reserved for baseball teams who haven’t played their first game of the season yet.
Everybody is in first place. Everybody has a chance to win the pennant.
Spring Training has engendered dreams of greatness in the fans. The playing fields are freshly mowed and the smell of new cut grass still hangs in the air.
Wine is the same. The harvest from September and October of last year (2020) has been crushed and lain in the dark cellars mostly untouched since last fall. Now, the winemakers must let go of the secrets they have held close for the better part of a year and let others taste the vintage.
For the last two weeks, those wines have been coming out of the darkness of their cellars all over the Northern Hemisphere but nowhere more so than in Bordeaux, France.
Bordeaux and the art of food and wine
It was in Bordeaux that I found out the French eat things you really shouldn’t eat. Eels, for instance, or to be more accurate, Lampreys. In ancient Greek and Latin, the name means “rock licker”. Well, OK, that might give you pause.
Lampreys are not an uplifting aesthetic experience. They are black for one thing, although there are white ones too. They are said to have nine eyes —although they actually have two eyes and seven gills on each side.
Just to be clear, they are not actually eels. Bordeaux is as famous for its lampreys as it is for its wine. It’s the signature dish of Bordeaux. The sauce is heavily dependent on the local red wines. Also garlic, shallots, sometimes tomatoes, and a bunch of other stuff you don’t want to think about.
So, I’m walking along in the Bordeaux Cays (pronounced “keys” usually), and the wine broker says to me, let’s go to lunch and taste the most famous dish of Bordeaux—eel (lamproie à la bordelaise in French).
I, of course, am thinking, so this is the day I die.
I’m too young to eat an eel.
Well, they say travel is broadening and I broadened quite a bit that day. It was actually wonderful, but the recipe is not for the faint of heart. For our purposes here, the point is that it is made with lighter Bordeaux red wines (Bordeaux Superior) and accompanied by very expensive ones (Chateau Lafite, for instance. Or, more realistically, Chateau Figeac or Talbot.)
The restaurant that day had a dark wood floor and reached out over the water. It had a glass floor in one section and as we ate, I could see the bursts of local fish and eels swimming in the river under us.
The eel we had for lunch was pulled out of the water less than an hour before it was served—although, that’s not usual. Smoked eel is more common. It is also ubiquitous in Bordeaux.
“No dish is more emblematic of Bordelaise cuisine than lamproie à la bordelaise, a devilishly unique dish starring slippery lampreys (a type of eel, practically prehistoric in appearance) that are fished in abundance in the nearby Gironde Estuary. Local myth says that when slaves in Burdigala (Roman Bordeaux) fell out of favour, the Romans fed them to the lampreys. “
The Birth of Wine Futures in Bordeaux
Before the great Chateaus along the Gironde began bottling their own wines they had only one place to sell—to Bordeaux wine merchants whose offices line the very cays I was walking along with the wine broker before the whole eel thing got out of hand.
Back then, the wine merchants bought the wine in barrels before it was finished, took possession, and then paid to balance, bottle and age the wines.
That put the financial risk on the wine merchants, instead of the Chateaus.
The merchants could lose money if their judgement proved wrong and the wine turned out to be disappointing or bad. Therefore they sold it as futures (pre-orders)—pay now and get a promise of delivery in a year or two. This shifting of financial risk could undergo several iterations with middle men trying to make money all the way down the line without actually taking any risk.
Some California wines attempt to emulate en primeur sales in France.
Today, this way of pre-selling expensive wines has evolved into the “En Primeur” (which means “First” in French) system. Chateaus bottle and store (rather than the merchants bottling and storing) but they sell the wine as futures (promises to deliver later) to cover their costs in advance, often still through brokers in the city of Bordeaux.
Customers who can get the wine at all pay in advance for wine delivery in a year or two in exchange for lower prices. Just as before, this shifts the financial risk from the Chateaus and onto the buyers.
Right now, in May 2021, the great Chateaus are allowing the first tastes out of the barrel from the 2020 vintage which was harvested eight months ago.
These wines are not even finished or balanced yet, but they are already being judged by “experts” and rated on a 100 point scale. The Chateaus are full of people trying to figure out how much to charge for this year.
Wine writers are in heaven in spring. They can tell you what’s good and what’s bad, give it a number and there’s virtually no one who can argue with them for a couple of reasons.
First, almost nobody has tasted it yet.
Second, the wines aren’t even bottled and no one, not even the winemaker can tell you what they are going to be like once they have been bottled and aged—the winemaker doesn’t even know yet what he or she will need to do to the wine before it is released.
So, they just make things up.
In general, the truth suffers in spring.
Everybody likes to predict the future. Now’s the time to predict the future of the great Bordeaux Chateaus. Ouija board anyone?
Wine barrels being sold as futures. Photo from “The Drinks Business”, 2016 en primeur https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2016/06/is-the-en-primeur-market-just-for-show/
Ah, spring. Speculators dream of big hits and wineries dream of being able to cover the electric bill.
The notes below are from en primeur tastings the last two weeks by Jane Anson of Decanter Magazine. If you want to know more the link is below this list.
Best Bordeaux 2020 wines: scores (Jane Anson)
Potential 100-point wines (98-100s)*
Note from Decanter Magazine:
*Jane Anson prefers not to give perfect 100-point scores at en primeur, pending reappraisal of the wines once bottled.
I don’t personally know either one of the people in the videos below. I am not recommending buying futures or anything else from them.
But the videos give you an idea of what’s involved. There are other ways to invest, but these are the more formal ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vRjPcqkLOY
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