Author and Wall Street Journal Europe wine columnist William Echikson raises a glass to the next generation of winemakers and entrepreneurs who are taking on and succeeding against the traditional wine masters of France.
Echikson spins his tale around the 2001 growing season in the venerable Bordeaux wine region. He discovers that the legacy of old family chateaus that have run Bordeaux for hundreds of years is now being challenged from inside France by a new generation of entrepreneurs, and from outside the country by New World competitors.
Readers are introduced to the players driving the competition, including:
- Robert Parker, reviewer and publisher of the Wine Advocate newsletter. Parker's rating scale of 50-100 revolutionized wine for the everyman and has become a standard in the wine industry. While winemakers with good pedigrees had previously gotten away with sub-par vintages, Parker claims to tell it like it is—"If the wine's no good, I'm going to say so."
- A new breed of Bordeaux entrepreneurs—"garagistes" like Michel Gracia, producer of the aptly named "Gracia" wine, who literally produce wine in their garages. Through hands-on attention to detail, and an increasingly global market, these garagistes are now able to compete on quality and price with some of the top legacy families from Bordeaux.
- Wealthy international entrepreneurs who buy chateaus as a good investment. They sell off their older businesses, buy a winery, and forego paying taxes while they run their wine business from the idyllic French countryside. These entrepreneurs symbolize a double threat: not only do they compete with the old guard, but if their wine is of lower quality, it risks sullying the Bordeaux reputation.
While all of this is going on, New World wines like Gallo and Mondavi are spending millions to create reliable, well-branded wines that are recognized throughout the world. [Gallo is currently breaking into the French market with an über-branding strategy]. As California cabernets begin to surpass the best wines from Bordeaux, the French wine industry can't deny that big changes have taken root.
Noble Rot is an interesting take on how the French are reacting to innovation in a market they had always taken for granted.—Manda Salls