New Wine in Old Bottles
ALAN, RAY
L'AFFAIRE BORDEAUX New Wine in Old Bottles BY RAY ALAN Bordeaux When I was a teenager, I was attracted briefly by a rather heady political movement called the Socialist party of Great Britain....
...Despite Ann and the hope of free fish and chips, I never joined the party because even my teenage innocence was troubled by such questions as: What would happen on Day One of Utopia if everybody made a dash for the champagne...
...What the fraud squad won't swallow, though, is vin ordinaire disguised as Bordeaux and marketed under the coveted AOC tag...
...Our brass got the rest...
...This was too much, even for the wine traffickers...
...And Beaujolaiswell, as everyone knows, Beaujolais is not a good traveler...
...The labels are frank provided you read them carefully and notice the absence of the magic words Appellation d'origine controlee And French fraud inspectors have been unable to fault them...
...It was distilled over wood fires and stored in oak casks for 10-20 years until it was mellow yet racy something like Raymond Chandler's prose: " 'Armagnac,' he said...
...An hour or two later he was upstaged by the news that this same prestigious product was being adulterated not by wicked foreigners but by respected citizens of Bordeaux, and with a cheap white wine said to be imported from Spain...
...Its local organizer was a charming, starry-eyed girl named Ann, and its objective was a wonderful welfare state in which money would be abolished: Everyone would work, of course, and in return whenever you wanted, say, fish and chips or a bottle of cider all you would have to do was ask and the community would provide...
...Output can be increased only gradually by introducing more prolific vines, and it is always at the mercy of the weather...
...Fine," I said...
...They are enforced by officials who are, on the whole, vigilant and honest...
...The flow of vin ordinaire can become a torrent at fairly short notice...
...Cynicism is suddenly fashionable in the French wine trade, and it is spreading to Spain where far too much third-rate wine and brandy are being sold under pretentious misleading labels to a largely undiscriminating tourist clientele...
...Then the Canard Enchatne reported that some Bordeaux wine-makers had been buying surprising quantities of animal blood plasma, and suggested they might have used it to convert white wine into the more expensive red...
...Growers and merchants mistrust each other, and both tend to despise many of their nontraditional clients the new-rich philistines who guzzle wine without appreciating it, and the businessmen who buy it in bulk as an investment...
...According to the mauvaises langues of Bordeaux, however, much of this brandy is now stored in cement vats that have just enough fragments of oak floating in them to give the brew the right color...
...yet how, in a moneyless society, with no price-mechanism to control demand, would you allocate not only luxury goods but even such modest treats as smoked salmon and Toblerone chocolate...
...The cost of red Bordeaux, for example, has tripled in three years, and thousands of French families can no longer afford their Sunday-lunch bottle of Medoc or Graves...
...This being France, the affair is already an affaire...
...At this point I must stress that the many regulations which have to be observed by France's wine producers (of whom, on a small part-time scale, I am one, not in the Bordeaux region) are clear and detailed...
...At the time it seemed to have an almost unfair advantage over the more humdrum Labor party...
...Now he knows: Nothing is sacred...
...Wine merchants have been trying to fill the Bordeaux gap by putting new wine into the old bottles...
...Nonetheless, in London I once came across several dozen Swiss millionaires who were holding a demonstration in protest against the long waiting-list for Jaguar cars...
...Thus, when demand for AOC wines soars As it recently has, notably in Germany, England, the United States, and Japan the price goes through the sky...
...The word was passed down the grapevine that the wine they had used to swell their stocks of Bordeaux was an honest French petit vin blanc from the Midi...
...I never expected to encounter the same kind of problem under capitalism...
...Armagnac, the brandy produced in the departement of Gers, southeast of the Bordeaux wine region, used to be another "prestigious product...
...Yes," he continued, "but do you know how much wine the Canary Islands actually produced...
...million liters...
...And now in France a lot of ingenious people some with red faces Are trying to answer the question: How, in a relatively affluent society, do you produce enough high-quality wine to go around...
...This summer they discovered and confiscated about 2 million liters (530,000 U.S...
...The problem, it seems, is not confined to the wine industry...
...Ballou looked shocked...
...One more reason why Spaniards are becoming a beer-drinking people...
...Excise officials and pressmen were suddenly sniffing like truffle-hounds around Bordeaux and other vinous regions...
...Less distinguished, albeit pleasant, wines from neighboring Bergerac, and frankly upstart liquids from the Minervois, Corbieres and Capestang vineyards, hundreds of miles away, are being sold increasingly in "bourgeois" Bordeaux bottles under Bordeaux-style labels...
...My God, you sip that stuff, you don't swallow it whole.' " (From The Little Sister...
...Things came to a head the day Robert Ballanger, leader of the Communist group in the Nationalist Assembly, was hoping to win a headline with a statement denouncing foreign (mainly British) capitalists who were bidding for wine firms in the Bordeaux area and, he said, trying to deprive the French of one of their most prestigious products...
...the Vanguardia was also making fun of the tendency of rural Spaniards to confuse "B" and "V...
...The Krauts cleaned most of it out...
...Export Beaujolais, Bordeaux dealers said, is stabilized with animal blood instead of egg-white and then "mummified" by a sort of pasteurization process during which it is heated briefly to about 80 degrees centigrade...
...Indeed, Old Armagnac is all too likely to be blended with harsh young spirits, and producers are trying artificial aging techniques...
...This stuff is pretty scarce...
...Personally, I am unimpressed by most of the horror stories currently circulating...
...Some are based on ignorance (animal blood has been used for years for the clarification of wine), and a few are inspired by malice...
...Here's to you.' "He lifted the glass, sniffed and sipped a tiny sip...
...How then can it be sold in the United States...
...Another scandal was uncovered: Three years ago 6 million liters (1.6 million gallons) of Bordeaux wine were discovered to contain a harmful chemical colorant and declared by the authorities unfit for sale...
...Bordeaux winemen began hitting back with threats of libel suits and tales of practices in other regions...
...But a wine that is granted the distinction Appellation d'origine controlee is made in a strictly circumscribed area...
...It tasted like good French brandy...
...The Spanish for Bordeaux is Burdeos...
...swindlers, too, are patriots...
...Has it been sold...
...Cruelly, the Barcelona daily Van-guardia published a big cartoon of a wine bottle labeled Bino de Vur-deos...
...And there was that dealer in Villefranche-sur-Saone who deceived even the experts with a "wine" of alcohol, tannin and plasmanot a drop of real wine in it...
...Only the other day a Spanish wine expert told me: "Twenty million liters of Canary wine were sold last year...
...gallons) of the stuff...
...Many storekeepers are complaining that the only vintages they can get are those the exporters don't want...
...I put mine down in a lump...
...The wine trade is still rocking, and the average Frenchman looks, when Bordeaux is mentioned, as if Napoleon's tomb had been sold to Disneyland...
...The main trouble is that, under marketing pressures, business and technology are superseding art and tradition in the main vineyards and upsetting values and tempers...
...Are not some well-known commercial brands of Burgundy mixtures of Burgundy and cheaper Languedoc wines...
...Ray Alan frequently reports in these pages on European affairs...
...If you knew me, you'd appreciate the compliment...
...Nobody is eager to say...
...That wine has since disappeared...
...If demand for beer or soda pop doubles it can be met by doubling output...
...Money was filthy and pernicious, agreed...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 20
