The bucolic opening sequence to The Hunger Games makes the dystopic Panem State seem homely; a place where you can stitch a quilt, or share a venison kill with your neighbours. We get to see a happy hearth, furnished with neatly tooled Shaker tables and chairs; then the film drowns us in unfairness.
AC Bordeaux’s rustic mise-en-scène hides its own catalogue of woes: vine-swept vistas and comatose stone villages to the forefront; behind, desolation, rural poverty and political cynicism. An inauspicious alliance between co-operatives and supermarkets has caught the majority of Aquitaine’s wine producers in a doom spiral of low prices and depressed wages.
In Panem, exploitation benefits the Capitol’s apex leisure class. The only way of escaping the oppressed outer districts is the games in the title: a fight-to-the-death entertainment show where the surviving combatants get the chance to live among their outré overlords.
The combatants are selected from the districts by raffle, whereas in Bordeaux the separation of the haves from the have nots is largely determined by Le Classement. Whether you’re in the money or Monoprix is largely determined by the postcode of your inheritance.
The situation in Burgundy is more fluid. Escaping the négociants’ vats has been propitious, but only if your holdings already included a hefty balance of Premier and Grand Cru vineyards. Over recent decades, the number of autonomous domaines has multiplied and revenues have increased. In the last century, we all applauded the little guys who defied the périphérique Goliaths and began bottling their own wines, but that early cheerleading has been muted by violent inflation.
Trickle down is the economic stimulus that supposedly backs down the bloated supply chains of the rich. We shouldn’t panic if we find ourselves priced out of buying Super Seconds, because the alternatives are manifold. If the law of perfect competition genuinely applies in Bordeaux, then producers who weren’t included in the original 1855 draft should now be seducing us with alternatives. Sadly, corroborating evidence for an upturn in petits châteaux’ fortunes is missing. Le Classement throws sand into the cogs of redistribution. The idea that wine quality is given rather than created is so deeply embedded in French wine lore that estranged buyers have taken the hint and got into the habit of looking for fulfilment elsewhere. Autocratic capitalism’s most consequential freedom for the wine business is the freedom to buy, but very little of this recently emancipated spending power has made its way across the Gironde, to Blaye.
New World producers aren’t as burdened by the past. They have embraced the more helpful qualitative associations of European production, mainly through their selection of premium varieties, but opted to steer clear of the sorts of laddered classification systems that condemn huge numbers of French vignerons to impoverishment.
Picking and choosing between associations isn’t always as straightforward as it was for Sir Cliff Richard when he asked David Baverstock to plant his Alentejo estate with, “Some of those Australian varieties, Shiraz and Chardonnay.” Varieties and methods of production tend to carry some of the baggage of the mother region with them, loose codes of practice that are liable to be updated. Bordeaux and Burgundy both channel influence through their respective cépages: Cabernet begs us to make vintage comparisons wherever it’s grown; while Pinot only truly captivates when production occurs on a miniaturist scale.
Simulation clearly works for Pinot producers in California and Oregon. Josh Jensen’s sincere interpretation of a Burgundian domaine split his original ten hectares of vines three ways according to elevation, aspect and soil type. Everything about Calera Estate implied Premier Cru quality, whereas on the Côte d’Or, any land to the east of the D974 is forever barred from any such presumption or determination.
In the early part of this century, English Sparkling Wine producers were probing for points of alignment with Champagne, in the hope of tapping into their own magical source of cross-Channel trickle down. In some very specific ways they passed the test of proximity: chalk, taste comparisons, climate and scalable brands; but the sales haven’t followed on as hoped.
With hindsight, we can see how the global demand for ultra-premium Pinot Noir and Chardonnay outstripped Burgundy’s meagre capacity, creating opportunities elsewhere. By contrast, the UK was already saturated with Champagne when the surge in UK sparkling wine production began. Offering copies of the market leader, however authentic, was always going to falter as a strategy.
Eighty miles south, and Grower Champagnes proper have found ways of flourishing in the face of colossal brand recognition, like agile mammals evading the crushing feet of dinosaurs. Anselme Selosse and Ulysse Collin, two figureheads of the movement, took inspiration from Burgundy, where domaine bottling effectively liberated producers from négociants, freeing them up to follow their own hunches and protocols. Spinning away from the Marne’s maximalist pole of brands, blends and co-operatives, this small band of miniaturist practitioners is evolving the sparkling wine zeitgeist in directions that could be very pertinent to a less scale-obsessed UK industry in the future.
I don’t think it’s too big a stretch to suggest that Anselme’s research background would have familiarised him to the concept of experimental design and the inherent pitfalls of delegation and data overload. Burgundianisation, when transplanted elsewhere, explores the congruence between discrete terroir separations and their optimisation, from vine through to wine. Above ten hectares, and the diligence of this connection, in terms of feel, competence and control, risks getting lost. Necessarily, there will always be some sharing of workload, even for the smallest domaine, but the principle division of labour between viticulture and winemaking doesn’t take place, as they’re merged in the head of one person.
This miniaturist approach to production is hugely expensive, and a successful outcome isn’t as straightforward as holding up a mirror to all your hard work and devotion. The efficacy of the method is largely predetermined by the chosenness or otherwise of particular sites. The most responsive vineyards will already (or potentially) sit towards the top of terroir’s vertiginous quality scale, loosely scattered above the heaving x-axis of geographical differences and names. In the Old World particularly, the very best sites not only stand tall above the pack, but they’re also far more reactive to the viticultural tweaks around yield reduction that most winemakers obsess over. There are no new rules in operation here, or easy to implement protocols that might alleviate the hardship for producers on the silty flatlands of Blaye and Gilly-lès-Cîteaux. Expressing terroir doesn’t necessarily even things up, or get you noticed.
To this last point, these early miniaturist adopters were also secessionists, frequently withdrawing from markets and distancing themselves from tradition and family. Initiating root and branch changes in viticulture and winemaking didn’t leave much headspace or time for commercial activities. When I first visited Selosse in the mid 1990s, his wines were priced a timid few francs above those of the nearby co-operative. The current situation couldn’t be more different. Gatekeepers, who back then controlled access to the media and publicity, have been rolled over by panoptic search engines and rhizomic social networking. The world has become simultaneously denser and more penetrable, and old economies of scale have lessened with respect to achieving visibility. This century’s latest reformulation for desirability is: right time, right place, right size. Wannabe market entrants need to take note.
Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash