Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  As part of my tour of the world’s major wine regions, I also returned to France. I met winemakers and policymakers and spent nearly a week at Bordeaux’s Vinexpo, the biannual bash of the international wine business. The picture that emerged was of a country thrown on the defensive in the domain it once dominated. A quarter century after the Paris Tasting, all those wines on display at Lavinia are challenging France, now just one of many countries making outstanding wine. France has been forced to fight to hold on to its traditional markets in Britain and the United States. France today retains many strengths, but it is now struggling and worried about its own wine future.

  The first two decades after the Paris Tasting, however, were a period of unprecedented prosperity for French wine. A new generation of consumers around the world was enjoying ever-higher standards of living and making wine an integral part of its affluent lifestyle. Huge new markets in wealthy countries like the United States, Japan, and Canada were discovering wine, and they turned to France for quality. The Italians or Spanish or even those new upstart Californians might make wine, but when the new wine drinkers wanted a show-off bottle they looked to France, especially to Bordeaux’s classified growths and Grand Cru Burgundy wines.

  The 1982 vintage in Bordeaux and the growing popularity of Robert Parker and his publicationThe Wine Advocate that had been started four years earlier set off a boom in French wines. Parker called the 1982 Bordeaux the “vintage of the century” and rated many of the wines in the high 90s using his 100-point scoring system. Consumers immediately rushed out to get their share of the great wines.

  All the planets were aligned for Bordeaux during the 1980s. In addition to the new Parker effect, the dollar was strong, making French wines attractive buys for Americans, and the weather cooperated to produce several great vintages during the decade. In this golden period for Bordeaux, newly prosperous winemakers doubled the size of vineyards in only twenty years.

  The 1980s were also a period of great technical progress in French wine, especially in the vineyards, where new and improved growing techniques were introduced. Just as California winemakers looked to research centers at UC Davis and Fresno State to help them make better wines, French winemakers turned more and more to their own wine institutes in Bordeaux, Dijon, and Montpellier for training and innovative research. Bordeaux’sÉmile Peynaud had a significant impact on French winemaking in the second half of the twentieth century, although not as great as Davis professors had on the American wine scene. While the Americans knew they were amateurs and readily accepted help, many French winemakers were confident in their traditions and disinclined to take recommendations from a professor. French wine for centuries was largely made by a world of peasants, with the exception of the few noble houses at the top. In the 1980s many of those peasants, though, were sending their children to school to learn the technical side of a craft that previously had offered little academic training.

  Domaine Comte Senard in Burgundy is typical of that changing French winery. The property has been in the Senard family for seven generations, but the current owner Philippe was the first member to have a formal wine education, which he obtained at the viticulture institute in Beaune. “The wisdom of the ages was passed along to the next generation, but the mistakes were also,” Senard told me. His daughter Lorraine, who is now making the white wines at thedomaine and will eventually take over the winery, also studied at Beaune.

  New French wine consultants also appeared on the scene in the 1980s to help winemakers. The most famous of these is Bordeaux’s Michel Rolland. Born in 1947, his family owned Château Bon Pasteur in Pomerol, where he went to work at an early age. Later Rolland expanded the family holdings in Bordeaux and built up a laboratory and consulting business that has worked with more than a hundred wineries from Chile to South Africa with stops along the way in the Napa Valley. Acting as a critic as well as a coach, he visits each winery several times a year at the most crucial times of harvesting and fermentation.

  Innovation flowed from the institutes and consultants into French vineyards and cellars. A better understanding of grape clones and soil structure led to higher yields, while growers learned to thin out their crops to increase the flavor intensity of the remaining grapes. Following Rolland’s strictures, growers left fruit longer on the vine. In the winery new stainless-steel tanks, pneumatic presses, and innovative bottling units replaced outdated equipment. A new emphasis was also placed on hygiene, and once straw-strewn wine cellars were now spotless.

  Perhaps the most important effect of all those changes was a new consistency in French vintages. In the old days the vagaries of French weather and the limited technical skills of winemakers meant that there might be only two great vintages in a decade. Better vineyard management as well as new winemaking techniques and equipment now made it possible for French winemakers to rescue the lesser vintages, while still enjoying the great years when nature smiled on the French countryside.

  In the 1980s, an important movement toward ecological viticulture also gained momentum. Known as biodynamics, its advocates, such as Nicolas Joly in the Loire Valley and Olivier Zind-Humbrecht in Alsace, rebelled against excessive use of insecticides, artificial fertilizers, and herbicides in favor of organic farming. Practitioners interfere as little as possible with nature. Only small amounts of organic material such as manure and composts are used to stimulate growth or control insects. French viticulturists today openly admit that in the early decades after World War II their predecessors overused the newly available artificial fertilizers. The man-made products left behind harmful residues that required years of remediation to rid them from the soil. While only a few French winemakers practice biodynamics in its most extreme form, the vast majority of French wineries now adheres to what they call “reasonable biodynamics” and follow its broad tenets at least to some degree. A few French wineries market themselves as pure organics, and at Vinexpo there was a small section devoted to organic wines.

  The French during this time also became more open to what was happening outside their country. Christian Vannequé, one of the judges at the Paris Tasting, told me that the event “made French winemakers more modest and they began looking at themselves differently.” Steven Spurrier has said his tasting actually had a greater impact on France than it did on California because it was a “wake-up call.”

  The leaders of some large estates like the famed Domaine de la Romanée-Conti had already been aware before the Paris Tasting that work needed to be done in France’s vineyards, but now other wineries were more prepared to accept non-French ideas. In November 1982, Domaine Guy Roulot, whose Meursault Charmes had come in second at Paris, did something that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. It hired Ted Lemon, an American winemaker! Jean-Marc Roulot, who was taking over the Domaine from his father who had died suddenly of cancer, had already learned something of what was happening outside France during an apprenticeship at the Joseph Phelps Vineyards in the Napa Valley. Lemon, though, knew both California wine from a harvest spent at Calera, a winery in the Gavilan Mountains south of San Francisco, and also French wine from studying enology at the University of Dijon and working at Burgundian wineries. Lemon stayed at Roulot for two years before moving back to California and eventually opening up his own Littorai Wines, which has vineyards in western Sonoma and western Mendocino counties.

  The style of many French wines changed during this time and became more aligned with international wine norms. For French reds this meant bigger, bolder, fruitier wines with sometimes a higher alcohol content than the traditional 12.5 percent. Most French reds are now ready to be drunk shortly after release, which is two years after the vintage. In the nineteenth century, it was nothing for a great Bordeaux to need an unbelievable 50 years in the bottle before it was considered ready to be consumed. Even in the 1960s, great wines were expected to be aged in the bottle for a decade, if not longer. Today’s consumers, especially in New World markets, are impatient and will simply not accept
tannin-heavy wines that still need several years of bottle aging to mature. For French white wines, especially Chardonnays, the new style meant a stronger oak taste and perhaps leaving some residual sugar in the bottle. Both of these characteristics had previously been anathema to French white-wine vintners.

  Then in the mid-1990s came roaring out of Bordeaux’s St.-Émilion thegaragistes, a group of innovative and irreverent winemakers who were not satisfied to just do things the way they had always been done. Instead of working out of ancient châteaux covered with ivy and steeped in tradition, they operated in unpretentious environs, often even in garages. Thegaragistes ran very small wineries that annually produced perhaps 250 cases of handcrafted wine. Often they practiced their art in vineyards that had not been previously noted for producing great wine. These perfectionists, though, performed miracles by carefully watching every step of the winemaking process and treating their product as the nectar of the gods. In the winter they pruned their vines severely to reduce the number of grape bunches. In the summer as the grapes began maturing they pulled individual leaves off the vines to expose the fruit to the sun. They left the fruit on the vine much longer than normal in order to eke out as much flavor as possible. At the last conceivable moment, and shortly before the grapes might begin to turn to raisins, they handpicked the crop, discarding any inferior or damaged fruit. The process was completed with plenty of aging in new oak barrels.

  The result was very concentrated, darkly colored, and deeply flavored wine. Because the production was usually very small, garage wines are generally very expensive and they are often hard to find in stores. Robert Parker became a huge fan of thegaragistes and regularly gave them high marks. He called La Mondotte “the ultimate garage wine” and described it as “ultraconcentrated, frightfully expensive, and worth every cent.” He routinely ranked Mondotte wines in the high 90s.

  Not everyone—not even some French winemakers—liked these new-style wines. Philippe Senard, for example, complained that many Burgundy wines are no longer as “subtle and delicate” as they used to be. Marc Beyer, whose Alsatian winery Maison Léon Beyer has been handed down from father to son since 1580, told me that some winemakers were using so much oak that they drove out the natural fruit tastes. He said that slightly sweet wines might score high in tastings but do not go well with food. Many French winemakers said privately that they worried about the impact Parker has had on French wine, although they would never say anything in public. Parker was criticized in particular for his high praise of thegaragistes . A Parker-style wine, though, resembles in many aspects the Michel Rolland–style of wine, and the international wine-drinking public has shown clearly that it likes the big Parker/Rolland wines.

  French wine got another enormous publicity boost on November 17, 1991, when the CBS news magazine60 Minutes broadcast a segment entitled “The French Paradox.” It recounted how the French, despite their diet heavy in cheese, cream, and fatty foods like duck, have much lower levels of heart disease than Americans. How can you explain this paradox? Reporter Morley Safer answered with scientific research that had found a correlation between drinking red wine and low heart disease.

  The cry could almost be heard across America: “Voila!I’ll drink to that!” Americans who might have thought that wine was bad for them now saw that it might actually make them healthier. U.S. imports of French red wine soared 30 percent shortly after the broadcast. The French wine industry jumped all over the French Paradox, financing new research in countries as far flung as Scandinavia and Chile to substantiate the earlier conclusions that moderate wine consumption, especially of red wine, is beneficial to your health.

  Starting in the late 1990s, however, the French wine business began running into trouble. As Jean-Luc Dairien, the general manager of Onivins, the French Wines Council, told me, “French winemakers, sitting on their little cloud and not worrying about what the world was doing, had fallen behind.”

  The clearest cause of concern has been changing French drinking habits. France has always been its own biggest customer. At the beginning of World War II, French soldiers had a ration of a liter (1.06 quarts) of wine per day, and for centuries during harvest workers were given a bottle of wine each day. Annual per capita French wine consumption peaked in 1926 at 35.9 gallons. But today the average French adult drinks less than 13 gallons per year and the number keeps falling. Wine no longer plays such a central role in the country that so identifies with it. While taking a cab to visit a winery in Beaune, the heart of Burgundy, I got to talking with the driver, who told me that he and his family no longer drink wine every day. Wine, he said, was now mainly for Sundays and holidays. Even Burgundians are not supporting their own business the way they once did.

  The biggest drop-off has been in red table wine called“gros rouge qui tâche” or “big red that stains,” which got its name from the red marks it left on tablecloths and anything else it touched. This reflects social change taking place in France. The number of hard-drinking blue-collar workers and peasants has been declining, while the number of office workers has been increasing. I remember from my time living in France in the 1970s how armies of workmen wearing blue manual laborer’s jackets walked up to the bar in cafés and brasseries around France several times a day to order“un ballon rouge,” the slang expression for a large, balloon-shaped glass of red wine. Today the sons of those workers may be white-collar executives and are more likely to order a draft beer in a nearby bistro. Studies show that young people in the country that epitomizes wine now regard it as old-fashioned—something that belongs to their parents’ generation.

  In the decade of the 1990s, total French consumption of wine dropped just 2 percent, but the decline in the lower-quality wines that are drunk daily was much more severe, falling 19 percent. The number of French people drinking wine daily or almost daily fell from 46.9 percent in 1980 to 23.5 percent in 2000. And people in their early sixties are four times more likely to drink wine daily than those in their early thirties.

  Some wine officials try to find solace in the fact that on average the French are drinking better wines.Boire Moins, Boire Mieux (Drink Less, Drink Better) has become the mantra of French optimists who hope that the business can make up in quality what it is losing in quantity. The higher-quality wines governed by the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée system accounted for only 14 percent of domestic sales in 1950 but are nearly 50 percent today.

  Fierce global wine competition centers around several price points: at the low-end, under-$10-a-bottle market, at the $10-to-$20 level and at above $50 a bottle. At the top end, France remains strong. Bordeaux’s Château Latour or Château Lafite as well as leading Burgundies like Romanée-Conti or Chevalier-Montrachet and Rhône Valley’s Hermitage or Côte Rôtie are able to demand—and get—high prices. With a large and growing world of wine consumers and the limited supply from those often very small, storied vineyards, those wines will always be scarce and expensive. But the classified wines make up only 5 percent of total Bordeaux production, and France cannot have a healthy wine business based solely on icon wines.

  France, at the same time, is very poorly positioned at the low end, where it has to compete not only with European countries such as Italy and Spain but also with New World mass marketers from Australia or Chile. They all have both the favorable weather and now the production facilities to turn out huge volumes of inexpensive wines.

  The most important part of the global market, where the coming battle in international wines will be fought, is in the $10-to-$20 range. New consumers in that segment reside largely in non-European countries where the market has been growing rapidly. These people are affluent and willing to pay more for quality wine, and if a producer can capture them at this point they are likely to stay with that company as they move up to still higher-priced wines. Australia’s Penfolds and Chile’s Concha y Toro have built powerful brands that are known throughout the world for offering a broad array of wines at a wide range of prices. They have become form
idable competitors to the French in international markets where consumers tend to have little national loyalty.

  By 2004, with both domestic consumption and exports continuing to fall, the French wine business was in a state of crisis. That year French exports declined in value by some 10 percent over the previous year, while Bordeaux sales abroad dropped some 25 percent. In the summer of 2004, the French government almost simultaneously put out a White Paper entitled “French Viticulture: The Role and Place of Wine in Society” and adopted several measures that would have been unthinkable only a few years before, to make French wines more competitive both at home and abroad. The White Paper was an academic treatise on the place of wine in French culture, describing it as “part of our history, our identity, our civilization.” The paper proposed, among many other things, defining wine as a food as a way to get around laws that ban the advertising of alcoholic beverages. At nearly the same time, the French Agriculture Ministry changed several wine regulations, although none involvingappellation wines. These made it possible for Vins de Pays wines, for example, to use inexpensive wood chips to add flavor, like the Australians do, rather than costly oak barrels. The ministry also allowed winemakers to make labels more consumer friendly.