Bloggasm

As a setback from the 90s wine craze, wineries have a HUGE surplus of grapes and wine. In America, many wineries have gone the “2 buck chuck” way (follow that link, the story is so fascinating that I feel compelled to tell it to anyone who will listen to it while we sip on Charles Shaw Wine). In the UK, they’re actually draining entire surplus “wine lakes.”:

Europe’s wine industry faces sweeping changes over the next few years as producers are offered big cash incentives to dig up their vines and finally drain the EU’s lakes of surplus wine.

Apart from fending off competition from New World wines by focusing more on quality than quantity, the idea is to divert subsidies to discourage unwanted surpluses that usually end up being distilled into industrial alcohol or biofuel.

Yummm. Lakes of wine.

But not to fear, despite the over-abundance of wine in Europe, French wine is as expensive as ever:

The news hasn’t sunk in yet. French wine amateurs seem still oblivious. All they have been talking about these past few days is the extraordinary prices reached by 2005 primeur Bordeaux wines: ‘€350 euros for a bottle of Lafite Rothschild. Since Robert Parker came three months ago and gave unprecedented marks, such as 99/100, prices have gone through the ceiling,’ says Jean-Louis, un amoureux du Bordeaux, half-worried, half-ecstatic. When I ask him whether he has heard of Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU commissioner for agriculture, and her wine reform, he replies: ‘No; should I know about it?’ Well, he might want to have a look at it. Her recommendations, if implemented, could change the face of the European wine industry for ever. I doubt she has realised the import of what she has set in motion.

I don’t know what this all means for the casual red wine drinker like you or me. Will prices go up or down? It says nothing about Australia, which produces the wine I buy most often: Yellow Tail.

But, what’s this? Are they actually going to simplify the wine categories? Not if the wine snobs can have their way!

My words are met with silence. Is he having a heart attack? A flow of furious invectives follows: ‘But this is insane! It will never happen; we’ll never accept it. What a preposterous idea. Wines are made of different kinds of grapes, rarely just one. What matters is where it comes from and who produced it. I would never dream of offering my guests a glass of cabernet sauvignon; it doesn’t mean anything. If I ask, “Would you like a glass of Chateau Pape Clement?”, they straight away know what I’m talking about. Simplify labelling? Bordeaux wines have the simplest labelling system in the world! There are 11,600 chateaux in Bordeaux and each produces one kind of wine: you like it or you don’t. Easy, non?’

Well, I guess I am slightly engaging in hypocrisy: I do feel kind of sophisticated whenever I drink red wine. I even turn up my nose to boxed wine. Maybe I should start speaking in an elitist French accent after all.

Related posts: Interview with Dover Canyon Winery