Many of us have watched Isabelle Saporta’s documentary, broadcast on France 3 you can watch it herehttp://www.france3.fr/emission/vino-business. Finally a documentary on wine that denouncing the relationship to money in our modern society. It underlines the fact that many châteaux putting first and above all the business aspect rather than the passion for their activity.
Nowadays we are producing a wine for Americans, another for the Chinese, in other words, it’s not people that adapt to the wines produced, but wines to fit markets, if this is not a financial matter what is it?
I found extremely interesting, the comparison with the Burgundy area. On the one hand we have a region that’s “traditional”, with a constant research for quality, going back to ancestral methods, and on the other, the development and making of great Bordeaux wines, with the use of pesticides, aromatized yeasts, totally mechanized maintenance, harvest and selection. These two regions have two well-defined manners of working, as well as making their wines. On the one hand you have large rich chateau’s, always searching in increasing their production, with the fear of a mediocre Parker notation, risking loss of sales, on the other winemakers, with the plough horse, harvesting and selecting by hand. In other words, quality against quantity! In the Bordeaux region, the grand crus are becoming increasingly expensive, the chateaux more and more beautiful, and finally they move an ever-increasing quantity of money. All this in order to produce made up, extremely linear wines, without character or expression! But of course, one should not talk about this, since the truth hurts and bothers many interests…No one is going to criticize the great Burgundy domains that are selling for several thousands of Euros a bottle of wine, because once again the respect for nature, organic agriculture or biodynamic, the search for quality are a priority. Each bottle will be “different” the wine isn’t “standardized” and without emotion. Some of the points raised by Isabelle Saporta’s documentary might have been exaggerated, but I think that her idea was to denounce modern wine manufacturing, as well as the particularities and the way Bordeaux chateaux function. Nevertheless one mustn’t forget certain family held exploitations in the Bordeaux area, that are holding out as well as they can. From father to son, these winemakers resist against the pressures that the large chateaus are exerting on them, and continue to make wine as their forefathers did.
Let’s not forget the basics: without emotion wine is nothing. Emotion is the soil, the winemakers work and manner in which he brings it up.
You can see parts of the documentary here below or the entire in the above-mentioned link. Everyone has the right to make his own opinion.
