Winemasters of Bordeaux [Paperback]

Almost thirty years after its initial publication, this book has gained a new saliency today with Bordeaux prices spiraling out of control like tech stocks in the late '90s. We all know how that story ended and for anyone inclined to think today's overheated wine market will end any differently, Nicholas Faith's account of the last big boom-and-bust will provide a useful history lesson. The early chapters of this book provide a brief history of the Bordeaux wine trade and the rise of the region's aristocracy, but the book's focus is the boom in claret prices in the early '70s and the inevitable crash that followed.

The boom period is best summed up in two epigraphs to the chapter aptly titled "Blast-Off." The first, from wine merchant Peter Sichel, recounts: "`Please send me six cases of Bordeaux Rouge,' a Bordeaux négociant was asked by a private customer. `Certainly, but I'm afraid I've had to increase the price from Frs. 3 to Frs. 6.' `Better send me twelve cases,' was the immediate and typical reaction." The next from Château Lafite owner Baron Elie de Rothschild: "The day I saw in Time Magazine a photograph of a bank vault with a bottle of Lafite in it I assembled my staff and told them, `The crisis has started.' Indeed from the moment when you start to think of wine as an investment and not as something to be drunk, that's the end."

Things began to fall apart when speculators were unable to deliver on futures contracts, having committed to sell wine they didn't own on the assumption they could cover their obligations later. Price surges undermined that strategy, since the speculators would have to source the wine at many multiples of what they had sold it for. Meanwhile, dishonest merchants were taking advantage of the boom by trucking in cheap vin ordinaire from the south and re-labeling the plonk as AOC Bordeaux, much to the relief of the over-committed speculators. The scandal became known as Winegate and took down some of Bordeaux's most entrenched aristocrats.

That sort of scandal is unlikely to spell the end of the current craziness. Speculation and market manipulation continue to feed manic price surges but there is little reason to believe anything illegal is going on or that it is animated by any vice more sinister than simple greed. But that does not make today's price explosion (with many prominent 2005s costing five times their 2000 counterparts) any more sustainable.

Proving the adage that an ounce of history is worth a pound of theory, Nicholas Faith's account shows that the rationalizations offered for today's high prices are the same ones the trade has used to pump the market since time immemorial. In October 2004, wine critic Robert Parker, Jr. published a much-chattered-about article making a dozen predictions on the future of wine, among which was a "world bidding war" for the finest wines fueled by the "burgeoning interest in fine wine in Asia" and other developing markets. In eerie similarity Faith recalls "the hysteria which erupted in the first half of 1973" fueled "in particular by the impression, rife that winter, that Japan was poised to replace the United States as the newest and most exciting market for claret." That tiger still hasn't roared. But it remains one of the trade's favorite bogeymen -- along with the art of creating artificial scarcities. Perhaps the earliest precedent was the proprietor of Château Rausan-Ségla, who sailed to London with casks of his wine to demand a price well in excess of what he could get at home. He gave orders "for one cask after another to be breached and the contents discharged into the river, demanding, as each cask was emptied, the same price for what remained as he had originally asked for his entire cargo which, as the somewhat doubtful story goes, he is said to have eventually obtained." Today the preferred strategy is simply to hold back half of your production to release at a trickle during future booms, a costless strategy once you double the price of what remains. History always repeats itself, both the booms and the busts.

An excellant and in-depth look at the underlying dynamics on one the greatest wine regions of the world. So much goes on.....and we the wine afcionado's know so little. If you are passionate about wine and history this book will give you an enormous perspective on the Bordeaux wine world.