‘That is a vast subject,’ says Audouze. ‘Obviously you have to rely on your experience to avoid falling into traps, but it’s fair to say that nobody is really safe.’
An article in French newspaper Le Figaro at the end of 2008 estimated that the market in counterfeit vintage wines was worth in excess of !200 million a year (‘La traque aux bouteilles falsifiées’, 3 November 2008). Marc-Antoine Jamet, president of the Union des Fabricants (set up in 1872 to protect French businesses from intellectual and industrial copyright infringement) told the paper that fraudsters were often able to obtain empty bottles bearing the original labels and fill them with low-quality wine. If this was not an option, no matter: the label could be counterfeited. The great vintages of Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne are the main victims of fakery, while the traffickers have been linked to the Italian Mafia. Inevitably, China has also come under scrutiny – Jamet told Le Figaro that wines were being counterfeited there ‘on an industrial scale’. A common trick is to steal an empty bottle of vintage wine from the kitchen of a leading hotel or restaurant, then refill it and sell it to a collector.
Perhaps for this reason, wine collectors tend to keep a low profile. Audouze feels that’s a shame, given that wine is such a convivial pleasure. One of the highlights of his year is a meeting with a fellow collector from the United States, at which they each uncork a bottle of the most prestigious vintages in their collections. Presumably, I joke, these wines are French rather than American?
‘There is a theory that American wines dating back to before 1970 are no longer drinkable, but that’s simply not true,’ asserts Audouze. ‘There are very few, but they exist. There are also some great Italian wines. But France has by far the greatest wine heritage in the world.’
Which brings me on to another question. Many of the wines I’ve mentioned above are brand names of a sort: Mouton Rothschild, Château Margaux, Château d’Yquem... even if we don’t know much about wine, they strike a chord. But surely the dusty chateaux of France deny the very existence of ‘marketing’ – don’t they?
VINTAGE BRANDING
The French wine sector is in trouble. Although the country is practically fused in our imaginations with the art of winemaking – and names like Burgundy and Bordeaux are brands in their own right – it has been losing global market share for years. As early as 2001, a report written for the French Agriculture Ministry by the consultant Jacques Berthomeau warned that ‘New World’ wines – from the United States, Australia, Chile and Argentina – had seized 20 per cent of the world market virtually from scratch in two decades. They had ‘gained ground through clever marketing, large-scale production and competitive pricing’ (‘France’s wine industry losing global market share to New World producers’, Food & Drink Weekly, 20 August 2001).
France is now the world’s third largest exporter of wine in volume, after Italy and Spain, according to April 2009 figures released by the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV). And consumption of French wine in France itself is falling as younger consumers turn to soft drinks, mineral water or (‘Quel horreur!’) wines from the New World. Many factors are blamed, from the variable quality of French wines to the confusion caused by their labels, which communicate the names of chateaux and regions rather than grape varieties, making it difficult for everyday consumers to determine exactly what they are buying. Many British consumers defected long ago to Australian wines, with their clear, modern and occasionally humorous labels, while American drinkers have the splendid wines of the Napa Valley to turn to.
The shaky position of France in the global market has sparked various trends, some of them alarming. There have been reports of French ‘wine terrorists’ expressing their support for domestic growers by attacking delivery trucks filled with imported wines. Less dramatic but more far-reaching is the suggestion that some French wines are becoming ‘Parkerized’. This accusation is based on the power wielded by the American wine critic Robert M Parker and his influential periodical The Wine Advocate. In it, Parker rates wines according to a 100-point system. A good Parker rating can have a positive impact on a wine’s price and sales. Parker’s critics – notably Jonathan Nossiter, maker of the 2005 wine world documentary Mondovino – claim that his influence has prompted some winemakers to deliberately adjust their production techniques in order to cater to his taste for powerful, fruity wines. Parker himself dismisses this as nonsense. ‘You can’t simplify my taste and say “Parker likes big wines” because it’s simply not true,’ he told The New York Times, adding that those who did so had not read his work properly. Later in the article, he said: ‘I think the diversity of wines today is greater than it’s ever been’ (‘Decanting Robert Parker’, 22 March 2006).
‘Parkerized’ or not, French wines have been trying to regain their high profile abroad. In 2006, the CIVB (Conseil Interprofessionel de Vin de Bordeaux), which represents growers, producers and merchants, ran a print campaign created by the advertising agency M&C Saatchi. Placed in upmarket newspapers and magazines, it played on the association of Bordeaux with grand chateaux. For instance, an image of a man and a woman looking at one another flirtatiously over glasses of wine was accompanied by the slogan: ‘If the lady refuses a glass, treat her to a chateau.’
As ever, then, the French are banking on the prestigious image of their product. Indeed, the International Organization of Vine and Wine confirms that France is still the largest exporter of wine in value terms, even as export volumes shrink, suggesting that it is still a successful producer of expensive wine. For a great many connoisseurs, French wines have lost little of their allure. When asked to name the greatest luxury wine brands, Evelyne Resnick, a wine marketing consultant and the author of the (2008) book Wine Brands, unhesitatingly names Château Haut-Brion, Romanée-Conti and Château Palmer among her top choices (along, admittedly, with the Napa Valley brands Opus One and Dominus).
Legendary French wine brands tend to have enjoyed what is described in Resnick’s book as an ‘organic growth’, which means that their very age has contributed to their status. Dig a little further, though, and you’ll find some canny marketing. Take Château Haut-Brion, for example. The wine owes its notoriety to the English – or rather, to a Frenchman’s grasp of the English market in the 17th century.
In 1666 François-Auguste de Pontac opened a tavern in London called ‘L’Enseigne de Pontac’ exclusively to promote his family’s claret. The wine was made in Bordeaux on the ancestral estate, Haut-Brion (‘on the hill’). The estate had been in the family since 1525, when Jean de Pontac cleverly married Jeanne de Bellon, daughter of a powerful local landowner.
But the most influential member of the Pontac family was Arnaud de Pontac, owner of Château Haut-Brion from 1649 until his death in 1681. Alongside the power conferred by his wealth, he was president of the first ‘Parlement’ in Bordeaux. His word, quite literally, was law. More importantly, however, he was a winemaker of genius.
According to a profile of the estate in Wine News, ‘it wasn’t until the property came... into Arnaud’s hands that the quality of its wine improved dramatically. He introduced the practice of regular racking from barrel to barrel, separating young wine from its coarse, early lees to avoid spoilage, and was among the first to realize that frequent “topping up”, to compensate for evaporation, allowed the wine in cask to improve rather than oxidize. These techniques, innovative for their time, allowed the true greatness of the vineyard to reveal itself in the wine’ (‘Haut-Brion: the world’s first cult wine’, April/May 2001).
Pontac was well aware of the market for red wine in London, where it was known simply as ‘claret’ – and ordered as such, with little regard for its origin. But Pontac’s wine was of such obviously superior quality that the patrons of London taverns and coffee houses began asking for it using an approximation of its name: ‘Ho Bryen’. The diarist Samuel Pepys noted on 10 April 1663 that he had drunk ‘a sort of French wine called Ho Bryen that hath a good and most particular taste I n
ever met with’ (Oxford Companion to Wine, 3rd Edition, 2006). This incident is said to have taken place at the Royal Oak Tavern, in which the Pontac family had a stake.
Very soon the family had its own London tavern, run by Arnaud’s son, François-Auguste. As well as selling the esteemed wine, François-Auguste hired a skilled chef to cook up more elaborate fare than was generally available at such establishments, effectively creating London’s first upmarket restaurant. The wine was sold at higher prices than its competitors, but it was the perfect accompaniment to the sophisticated cuisine and the tavern’s convivial surroundings. Haut-Brion had established itself as a luxury brand.
The family lost the Haut-Brion estate during the French Revolution, after which it fell briefly into the hands of Talleyrand, the wily diplomat who had served under both Louis XVI and Napoleon. A succession of owners followed down the centuries, one of the most notable being Jean-Eugène Larrieu, who bought the estate at auction and whose family owned it until 1923.
The modern era began on May 13 1935, when an American banker named Clarence Dillon bought the estate. Most accounts maintain that Haut-Brion’s continuing success was due not to Dillon, but to his nephew Seymour Weller – who was named president of what had now become a business – and its director Georges Delmas. The company they ran, Domaine Clarence Dillon, still owns the estate today. Its honorary president is Madame la Duchesse de Mouchy (the former Joan Dillon, granddaughter of Clarence), while its president is her son Prince Robert de Luxembourg, and its director is Jean-Philippe Delmas, grandson of Georges.
As well as various technological advancements that are well known within the winemaking community (for instance, the introduction of stainless steel fermentation vats and research into clonal selection, which involves taking cuttings from the ‘best-performing’ vines), Haut-Brion is notable for its savvy marketing. For a start, it comes in a distinctive bottle, with sloping shoulders and a medallion bearing the wine’s name embossed into the glass just below the neck. This design was introduced in 1958. As Evelyne Resnick points out, by rights ‘no estate needs an original bottle less than Haut-Brion, classified First Growth [Premier Cru] in 1855 and since then served on all royal and presidential tables throughout the world.’ Not to mention on the tables of lesser mortals who might wish to appear presidential – and can telegraph their status to an entire restaurant via the bottle.
THE REIGN OF TERROIR
Haut-Brion also appears to have grasped the importance of a snappy name for overseas customers. For years its ‘second’ wine was named Château Bahans Haut-Brion, after the parcel of land on which the vines were planted. ‘Difficult to pronounce, even for French people,’ observes Evelyne Resnick drily. In 2009, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Clarence Dillon’s first visit to the chateau, the name of the wine was changed to ‘Clarence’, which would also appear on the embossed medallion. The decision adhered to one of the classic strategies of luxury marketing, which is to repurpose one’s heritage in order to tell an attractive story to the potential consumer. Still, one has to admit the name has an attractive ring to it: make mine a bottle of Clarence.
Haut-Brion was by no means the first of the Bordeaux titans to launch a new brand. In 1998 Château Palmer unveiled Alter Ego. The wine can be drunk younger than its big brother and is positioned as ‘spontaneous and uninhibited’, which seems designed to appeal to younger consumers.
Château Palmer itself attracts an almost slavish following. This is not entirely due to the inarguable quality of its wine. The estate – acquired in 1814 from the Gascq family by Charles Palmer, a major general in the British army – has also used a digital strategy to generate customer loyalty.
Evelyne Resnick notes that Château Palmer ‘came rather late to the web: their first site was launched in 2001, when most of the estates in the Bordeaux area were already working on their second or even third versions.’ This, however, allowed the château to learn from its neighbours. One of the challenges faced by the estate was the fact that, like many others in Bordeaux, it sold its wine through brokers, which meant that it rarely came into contact with its customers. The website helped it solve that problem. In order to gain access to the full content of the site, visitors had to sign up to become members of a Château Palmer ‘club’. In return for leaving valuable data, they received several privileges, the best of which was an invitation to spend a day in the vineyards during the harvest. While picking grapes may not be light work, visitors revelled in the experience and the exclusive access to the estate and its management. Château Palmer’s website still lies at the heart of its communications strategy. Highly interactive, it includes a blog with written, audio and video content.
Needless to say, some connoisseurs find it disheartening that commercial realities force even the greatest winemakers to resort to branding and marketing techniques. ‘Branding’ a wine undermines the cherished ideal of the terroir – the land where the wine is grown and which lends it its distinct character. The implication is that customers who rely on a brand name to identify a wine are uneducated dolts who would not know – to use François Audouze’s metaphor – a flint from a pebble.
Citing Micheal Havens, founder of Havens Wine Cellars in California, Eveylyn Resnick suggests that there are two different marketing techniques in the wine business: one for entry-level brands and one for luxury brands. Entry-level brands focus on ‘synthetic marketing’, which emphasizes the brand’s concept, label and price, only then followed by the wine itself. ‘Organic marketing’, on the other hand, focuses on the wine and the region first.
If wine snobs – sorry, ‘connoisseurs’ – insist that wine should be categorized by place of origin rather than brand name, how did the winemakers of California generate any form of respectability during the ‘new wave’ of the 1970s? Although wines had existed in California since the 18th century, Prohibition had largely destroyed the industry and by the 1960s the region was associated with underwhelming sweet wines. The renaissance that began at the end of that decade owes a great deal to the knowledge and marketing instincts of one Robert Mondavi.
Mondavi – who died in 2008 aged 94 – was born in 1913 to an Italian immigrant family in Hibbing, Minnesota. A few years after his birth, his father decided to become a winemaker and the family moved to California. When Robert graduated from Stanford in 1943, he persuaded his father to buy the Charles Krug Winery in Napa Valley. Robert worked at the family business with his brother Peter right up until 1966, when a simmering difference of opinion over winemaking techniques led him to quit and start his own winery – at the age of 52. Mondavi had been inspired by several trips to Europe, where he ‘began a quest to understand terroir – the French notion of how soil and climate affect grapevines and shape the character of a wine’ (‘Robert Mondavi dies at age of 94’, Wine Spectator, 16 May 2008).
Mondavi had a gift for inspiring others. He welcomed visitors to his winery for tours, tastings, art exhibitions and concerts. He and his wife Margrit created cooking classes with great chefs – such as Julia Child and Paul Bocuse – who experimented with different matches of food and wine. As Wine Spectator comments, ‘rather than limit wine to fine dining, Mondavi championed making it a part of everyday life and of a healthy lifestyle.’ His friend and public relations advisor Harvey Posert told the magazine: ‘The programmes – comparative tastings, harvest seminars, great chefs, summer concerts, the mission programme – all had the sole purpose of explaining wine’s positive values to the public and to the industry he served.’
Mondavi also understood and appreciated the importance of Europe’s winemaking heritage. In 1979, he joined forces with Baron Philippe de Rothschild, of Château Mouton-Rothschild in Bordeaux, to create Opus One. The resulting wine, which sprung out of a marriage of French and Californian winemaking traditions, ‘caught the attention of vintners and businessmen worldwide. Baron Rothschild’s desire to partner with Mondavi validated the quality of California wine and ushered in a new era of foreign investment in C
alifornia. By the 1980s, dozens of international firms had bought land or built or bought wineries in the state.’ The mythology around French winemaking helped California wines win the respect they deserved.
A strange footnote to Mondavi’s adventures occurred in 1976 at the so-called ‘Judgement of Paris’, a wine-tasting event organized in Paris by the British wine merchant Paul Spurrier. French judges were challenged to a blind tasting of chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon wines from France and California. In the event, California wines were rated best in each category. The French wines on the table included a 1970 Haut-Brion, a 1970 Mouton Rothschild, and a 1973 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles. But a 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay from Napa Valley was the top-rated white, while a 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon, also from Napa, was ranked highest among the reds.
Thus 24 May 1976 was the day when the reputation of French wine began its slow decline. To an extent, at least; on the 30th anniversary of the event, an article in online magazine Slate observed that although the French had been ‘blindsided by aggressive competition’ from other markets, ‘the very finest French producers... thanks in part to the Judgement of Paris... recognized early on that the New World was capable of making excellent wine, and they worked hard to improve their own offerings... The good French wines have never been better.’ Still, gone are the days when, in the words of one Burgundy winemaker, ‘there is a belief that you don’t need to market your wine, that France’s reputation is enough’ (‘The judgement of Paris’, 24 May 2006).
Luxury World: The Past, Present and Future of Luxury Brands Page 21