Rethinking what it means to be a ‘fine’ wine
On a sultry Saturday in the South of France in mid-June, many of the world’s best and brightest wine minds and a smattering of other intellectual luminaries — economists, techies, politicos and multidisciplined visionaries — gathered at La Verrière, a splendidly restored medieval property that was once a glass factory and for the past decade has been home to Nicole and Xavier Rolet’s ambitious, grenache-centric Chène Bleu winery.
Xavier’s day job is serving as the president of the London Stock Exchange. He’s considered one of the world’s leading analysts of global finance.
A few people like me also got invited.
The Rolets’ reason for convening this “Fine Minds 4 Fine Wines, a Think Tank Amongst Wine Tanks” was twofold: to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Chène Bleu and to contemplate what the years ahead could hold for this product we call “fine” wine. Admittedly, those of us who merely live in the wine bubble as consumers don’t fully grasp the discomfiting issues confronting the industry in the 21st century, when anybody can have a Robert Parkersize platform to prattle on about this bottle or that.
And, while the democratization of wine criticism has been hugely beneficial for expanding the conversation, it has upended the traditional hierarchies, particularly impacting Bordeaux and Burgundy, the planet’s two viticultural regions that, 50 years ago, stood almost solely synonymous with the concept of fine wine.
The British wine writer Janice Robinson, the first to earn Master of Wine status who hadn’t first been a wine-trade insider, was among the participants. Robinson later pointed out in her blog how this first-of-its-kind melding of oenophiles with the cool-kids TEDtalk crowd “took place during the death throes of the 2016 Bordeaux en primeur (futures) campaign, which,” she said, “to judge from my inbox and website, elicited minimal interest. The number of views of the relevant thread on our Members Forum is one-seventh the equivalent number last year.”
The times are indeed changing. Attendees that I conversed with in the greatest depth admitted they, like me, found the mere concept of quoteunquote fine wine, our fundamental starting point, to be hopelessly anachronistic — if it’s to be implied that a wine can only be truly fine if it hails from a certain prestigious place and goes for above a certain price point.
Fortuitously, one of my fellow panelists was Manuel Louzada, the director general of Propriedad de Arínzano, the Spanish winery whose elegant chardonnay from Navarra won Grand Champion Best of Show honors in the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo’s 2017 International Wine Competition. The Arinzano certainly fits the fine-wine profile costwise, selling for north of $70, but who would have ever thought a white from a once-obscure viticultural region in northwestern Spain could outshine more than 2,500 wines of every color in a blind tasting?
Louzada and others suggested that adjectives such as “natural” (but not in the organic sense) and “authentic” are better descriptors in 2017, suggesting that wine must speak to its provenance and be made without excessive manipulation and trickery, either in the vineyard or the cellar. Because so many producers have come to grasp this simple concept, wine shoppers have never had a greater array of high-quality, fairly priced options, and it’s going to behoove producers, even the ones with most historically highfalutin reputations, to become more engaging with the public and more social-media savvy to maintain their prestigious standing.
The wide-ranging array of questions we sought to find answers for included:
• How will the trend toward deformalization of fine dining affect the future of fine wine?
• How will fine wine adapt to a new generation of post-Parker tastemakers?
• What will generationnext sommeliers be looking for when they build their lists?
• What are the next seismic economic shifts likely to be — climate change factors hugely into this — and which large wine regions are likely to be most affected?
• How will tradition and terroir work in the IoE (internet of everything) world?
• How can wine producers grasp the opportunities presented by the trends of smart luxury and eco-luxury?
• From wineries to the wines they produce, who will be tomorrow’s investors and which regions will be attracting the most investment dollars?
• Can wine help connect generations and cultures that are growing apart?
• Can wine, in conjunction with its “sacred” rituals, preserve its place as a bastion of high culture?
Definitive conclusions and fail-safe courses of action, of course, proved elusive — think tanks are, by definition, ongoing entities — but the conversations were spirited and we were rewarded for all our deep thinking by to-diefor tasting opportunities. Each participant was required to bring a bottle of what he or she considered a “fine wine,” and these would be shared communally during our Saturday lunch break.
Two of the most memorable for me were the 1997 Château Rayas Châteauneuf-du-Pape and the 2003 Château Margaux, fine wines by anybody’s definition and priced accordingly (from about $350 online). The latter was provided by Thibault Pontallier, whose late father, Paul, was the transformative managing director of Château Margaux for three decades.
Pontallier got a healthy taste of the old world of fine wine, being able to grow up where and how he did, but he has also positioned himself for what comes next. With his dad’s help, he launched a line of wines called Pont des Arts (pontdesartswine.com) and, working with Alexandra Petit-Mentzelopoulos, the youngest daughter of Margaux’s owner, Corinne Mentzelopoulos, has opened Clarette, a wine bar in London’s posh Marylebone neighborhood.
While multiple vintages of the iconic First Growth Bordeaux are on offer, so are myriad price-friendly options from other places, equal parts famous and obscure. Pantallier and Mentzelopoulos may be from aristocratic families, but they get the egalitarian thing, too. It’s the future because fine is in the eye, or taste buds, of the beholder.