Land Rover, Jaguar, Honda, Mini and LDV (they make vans) are all suffering in the global economic meltdown. They looked to the banks, who are similarly screwed, for an overdraft, but the banks are now owned by the government, who said no. And you can understand why they turned them down. When the British owned MG Rover came knocking on Number 10’s door for help in 2004, Gordon Brown, in his role as Chancellor, turned them down and they went under. He could hardly say yes in 2009 when the companies asking for money are owned by the Indians, Japanese, Germans and Russians otherwise he would have an angry mob of Brummies beating down the door of Number 10. Also, the last time a Labour government got involved in the car industry they ended up as the majority shareholder of British Leyland which produced crap cars and had workers who spent more time around a brazier then actually making vehicles. Come to think of it, those workers were from Birmingham too…These troubled car companies are all shutting their factories at the moment because they don’t have enough orders coming in. Their former customers are using the money they would normally spend on a new car for frivolous things like food and heat as they all realise that they don’t need a new car every two years. Unfortunately, car companies have geared themselves up for production levels that are seriously higher than will be needed in the coming years and have reasoned that they need to shut it all down for a few months or bankruptcy will do it for them, permanently.
The problem car companies have is supply exceeding demand. Amidst the downturn in the big car companies fortunes, producers like Morgan, who are making as near as dammit the same ash framed car they have been since the Titanic was being built, are doing fine. They may make less than seven hundred cars each year and there is a two year waiting list, but they are not laying people off despite their cars costing more than most people’s annual salary. A few years ago, I am certain that Morgan could have borrowed the money to double their annual production, and they would have sold every one. Had they done that however, they would have needed to recruit more staff, increase their costs and now could be facing a problem of being able to make 1500 cars yet only sell half that. Workers would be made redundant and the company would be in hock. Doubling production would also tarnish their brand, it wouldn’t be as special as it is at the moment and traditional Morgan buyers would abandon ship the first time Wayne Rooney was spotted near a showroom.
Which got me thinking about Bordeaux. A wine like Chateau Margaux will sell for huge amounts during prosperous periods, particularly when the product is excellent. This happened, as we all know, a few years back with the 2005 vintage. In a year like this, wine makers have created a piece of art that everyone wants and only a few can afford. Margaux, like Morgan, are making a stunning product and, quite rightly, charge as much as they can for it. But imagine that Morgan, instead of using the finest Ash to make their car’s wooden frames, started using MDF. Instead of leather on their seats, they used vinyl and instead of an excellent, sporty engine they put in one from a tractor. All of a sudden, people would realise that the product was no longer as good, and would stop buying. This is essentially what the Bordeaux producers do when they have a vintage that is poor... sorry, there is no such thing as a poor year. It is challenging/interesting/unusual.
In August 2000, after a series of challenging/interesteing/unusual vintages in the late 1990s, Decanter magazine published an article that asked if the en primeur campaign was destined for extinction. They argued that unless prices were considerably lower than they would be a year later, or if stock would not be available six months down the line, there was no real point in putting your money into wine before it is even bottled. The general consensus was that greed was going to be the Bordelais great undoing.
The article then says that the 2000 vintage would be the deciding factor, with a good year reinvigorating the en primeur market and a poor one putting the final nail in the coffin.
Nine years on, we know that the millennium vintage was a good one and as predicted we are still stuck with this outdated method of buying Bordeaux. Two thousand and five was another good year and took prices to even more stratospheric heights. But now, three vintages on, people are muttering about en primeur being outdated and that it should be taken out back and shot.
Instead of killing off en primeur however, I think that Bordeaux should take a leaf out of Morgan’s book and make their product uber exclusive and use the en primeur market to sell their elitist product. In a similar way to vintage port or vintage champagne, instead of producing a wine every year, the Bordelais should have a standard of quality for their top wine label and only when the vintage achieves that level should they declare such a wine.
There will be those that will say it will reduce the income of the chateaux, but I would think that if only two or three vintages are released each decade, these wines will shoot even further up in price and more than cover the loss of income in the other years. It will put the likes of Mouton Rothschild or Margaux even further out of reach of a majority of the world, but, lets face it, can the majority of you reading this actually afford these wines now? We can’t afford Morgans either so we make do with other cars and we’d do the same with wine. But if we know that in non declared years, the best grapes from Margaux, Mouton, Lafite et al are in another wine we will rush out to buy that. And I’m not suggesting that the first growths put their non vintage years into Tesco’s Finest Claret. In every non declared year, they can use the grapes to make a different labelled wine which can be sold through agencies at a price that will result in the wines being drunk rather than hoarded. If these wines are then kept in the Chateau’s cellars until they are ready to be drunk, this would make sure that a lot of this wine is drunk rather than hoarded in a collection somewhere.
I appreciate that this will never happen and that every time there are a few poor vintages on the trot, we will have people mutter about the outdated en primeur system and how it should be abandoned. What nobody has done however is suggest an alternative. It has to be of benefit to both the consumer and the producer. We can moan for ever about how the Bordelais are fuelled by greed, but when a 1961, 1982 or 2005 vintage comes along, we are the ones who refill the gas tank and buy these over priced products. My suggestion has flaws, but it is a plan where everyone wins or, in the case of the less wealthy wine enthusiast who can’t afford first growths now, is at least is no worse off.
At the moment, the only group winning are the Bordelais.
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