About a year or so ago, at a restaurant in Charlotte Street, an Argentinian winemaker – one of the best – asked me about the market, and how I thought his latest releases would be received.
He wasn’t too keen on my reply. I must look young for my years as he then gave me a short lesson on how to sell expensive wine, the gist of said lesson being that I shouldn’t just be talking about how it tasted, how I thought it might age, its intrinsic quality, etc: what I should be doing is comparing it to something like a Rolex. That was where I (and, seemingly every other UK wine merchant) was going wrong. I thought nothing more of it on the day, though was mildly irritated if only because I respect the man and I rate his wines more than most.
And I wrote a bit down and dropped it. And then a couple of months ago a couple of guys from one of Bordeaux’s most serious properties turned up at the office to show us the latest release of one of their wines. The wine in question is excellent. And it’s relatively cheap. And it will likely work (indeed it since has) on account of those two factors. And all Mr Frenchie had to do was tell us the price, and let us taste the wine, and his job would have been done. But Mr Frenchie’s château is owned by a mahoosive corporate group, and they’ve got marketing departments, business development directors, maybe even heads of positive impact. And he started talking to us about “telling the story” and “supporting the brand”. This is what Bordeaux needs, he reckoned (it ain’t).
And then a week later one of the guys at work sends me an invite he’s received from a “fine wine business consulting” company offering to fly him to Tuscany for a couple of days to visit an estate whose Chianti sells (or most likely doesn’t) for £100 a bottle plus. Apparently their estate absorbs more CO2 than it emits; I don’t know if that includes flying a bunch of wine merchants over for a jolly.
And now we have the “September releases”. For which read for the most part: a load of wines that for the most part no one wants, invariably offered at the wrong prices. Many of these wines epitomise all that is wrong with the current market and I’ll wager that most of them will be available for less money in a couple of years’ time (a trick successfully pioneered by the Bordelais). In a market that is already blocked up with unsold wine that nobody can sell we have a month of even more of it – pretty much the last thing anyone needs. Though this doesn’t stop most of the merchants (many or most of whom are losing money) trying to squeeze some desperately-needed revenue out of it. Inboxes are bombarded with emails offering 98 point this and 99 point that – those points frequently coming from the least reliable of scorers – urging their customers that they need to act quickly to secure their case of wildly-overpriced Chilean/Italian/Spanish/whathaveyou (with a 10,000 dozen production) before it sells out.
Which takes us to the crux of the problem. No one knows what any of this stuff is worth as nothing sells through (we just know what it’s not worth). No one knows what’s good or not because so many of the critics (I stress not all of them) are either lying about what they’ve tasted or are simply unqualified to make a judgement. And to top it off many if not most of the merchants are taking their customers for mugs.
And, whilst there are multiple challenges to all businesses at the moment, this refusal to face the key problem is like watching someone hit themselves in the face with a fish, over and over again. It’s not (just) about deluded proprietors with their heads in the sand: it’s just as much about the guys further down the chain (and their marketing departments) following their lead when the Emperor has been in his birthday suit for quite some time now.
Sooner or later this market will sort itself out. It’s very simple: the law of supply and demand will prevail. What is drawing it out is the misguided belief on the part of producers, merchants – anyone on the supply side – that we can get out of this through marketing rather than price correction.
