Bordeaux: Can you argue with the market?

Lots of people reply to my anti-Bordeaux price hike blogs with the likes of ‘well, you can’t argue with the market’ or ‘go spend your money elsewhere’ or ‘why waste your breath – they are simply doing the same as any company’. Which is good – I want to encourage debate – and I will, albeit very ungracefully, cede on these points.

But to those who tell me to stop tilting at windmills, as it were, might I point you in the direction of a recent news story concering a Bordeaux négociant (a kind of wine wholesaler) and Château Rauzan-Ségla?

My first point would be that, if the market was unquestionable (you either buy or don’t buy) why are the intermediaries making a point of complaining about ‘ludicrous’ prices? Why are some of the most important people in the Bordeaux food chain allowed to say certain prices are absurd and not an opinion piece on a website? As one decanter.com reader rightly points out, there are other châteaux that have hiked their prices just as much as Rauzan-Ségla. So why not attack those others? Let the games begin, I say.

Furthermore, if the very man responsible for running a Bordeaux Second Growth is annoyed at his own prices, surely I’m in good company when I attack the top Bordeaux châteaux? In fact John Kolasa (who runs Châteaux Canon and Rauzan-Ségla) should be quoted in full:

‘I’m a bit annoyed myself that prices are so high but as the representative of the owners I’ve had to follow the line.’

A statement that twists your mind more than the smallprint on a subprime loan package. I like Kolasa, he strikes me as one of the more grounded guys in Bordeaux, but to say he doesn’t like the prices of his own wines and that, in any case, he’s toeing the line, is asking more questions of his audience than I think we know how to handle.

Is Kolasa lying to us? Is it simply that he feels he should offer himself as a sacrifice to those people, like me, who think that Bordeaux is too greed-ridden and overpriced? Which would indicate that the points I make in my blog have considerable resonance.

Or is he telling the truth, which means that he too believes Bordeaux – and his own wine, for that matter – is overpriced? Because that also vindicates – yes, you guessed it – me.

So as well as hopefully silencing everyone who says that I’m basically just complaining that I can’t afford good Bordeaux, I will also make one simple declaration: I will stop fighting the unwinnable when the top Bordelais start saying the unthinkable.

By which I mean that I will give up attacking top Bordeaux when the people behind top Bordeaux stop pretending and saying things like ‘we don’t make wine for speculators’ or ‘we make wine to be drunk’ or ‘we are simply responding to the market’.

It’s already well known that top Bordeaux châteaux are holding onto stock (which kills the idea that they make wine to be drunk) in order to increase the demand (which is altering, not responding, to the market) and which enables the château to sell the rest of the production at auction in years to come (which is basically speculation).

When the Bordelais admit they are brand-builders that run highly successful businesses with little to no interest in a global, humanitarian, all-encompassing, wine-lovers ethos, then I will leave them alone.