Andrew Jefford: great wine speaks for itself
Andrew Jefford
Roots, soil and wine-stained hands: that’s what counts. The Covid-19 pandemic, with its economic setbacks and personal tragedies, has changed the way we think about wine, and corrected some of the excesses of the last two decades. More on this in a moment – but first let me recap a business drama.
Hermès (you may own a scarf or a tie) was founded in 1837 to make high-quality bridles and harnesses for noblemen’s horse-drawn carriages. Its business adapted over 150 years, but not the insistence on craftsmanship and the use of natural materials. The founding Dumas family took the business public in 1993, retaining an 80% stake. It prospered, to the extent that Bernard Arnault of LVMH eyed it acquisitively. LVMH secretly amassed shares in Hermès using derivative contracts. The Dumas family was furious when it discovered the ploy in 2010; war ensued; eventually LVMH sold out, in amply rewarded frustration, in 2017. ‘We are not luxury,’ Hermès CEO Patrick Thomas explained indignantly in 2010. ‘We are high quality, based on exceptional artisanal work.’
When you scan the Hermès range, you may feel the company was protesting a little too much – but the distinction is still a thoughtprovoking and useful one. ‘Luxury’ is an aspirational world of its own, driven by brand and image. No luxury price tag need trouble itself with something as mundane as production costs: you charge what you can get away with. Brand and image are the rocket fuel enabling prices to soar skywards. Indeed, luxury products aspire to be ‘Veblen goods’: those for which demand actually rises with each price hike.
Over the last two decades, parts of wine’s upper echelons have enthusiastically adopted the ‘luxury goods’ mindset, most visibly in Champagne, though the same trend can be seen in Bordeaux, in Napa, and in the marketing of ‘icon’ wines generally. Elaborate packaging initiatives (Penfolds’ 2012 limitededition glass ampoule or Roederer’s Cristal Gold Medallion 2002 jeroboam) and celebrity special editions (Dom Pérignon Lenny Kravitz Edition 2008) are a clue, but breathless advertising, preciousness of discourse (Dom Pérignon and its ‘Plénitudes’; Penfolds and its ‘g3: only 1,200 bottles available on this Planet’) and price increments are the surest symptoms of wine that wishes to see itself as a ‘luxury’ purchase.
Does it work? If the Champagne sections of the world’s top restaurant wine lists are a guide, it fails comprehensively. Grande marque Champagnes are now outnumbered by verticals and terroir Champagnes from the likes of Agrapart, Bérèche et Fils, Ulysse Collin, Jacques Lassaigne or Pierre Péters; Selosse, for many, is clearly a more appealing name than Krug and Dom Pérignon. The sommeliers and their customers have voted for ‘exceptional artisanal work’ rather than ‘luxury’, for truth to origin and labour rather than gloss and image. Covid, in any case, has thrown cold water over Champagne. Witness the partial picking of the high-quality 2020 harvest: shocking neglect of nature’s bounty, though perhaps logistically necessary.
Our post-Covid wine world will be a more modest, realistic and humane one, checking the migration of its upper echelons towards luxury and pretension. Expect Champagne houses to position themselves as the region’s leading growers where they have substantial estates; if not, then the reinvention will be as engaged vineyard partners, and winemaking workshops of craftswomen and craftsmen. Jacquesson’s downsize and gearshift a couple of decades ago showed the way in all this.
Great wine needs no help from designers and celebrities. It doesn’t need to distract in order to seduce. Great wine is a gift of nature, fashioned by artisans and limited in supply. That’s what we love about it; that’s where its wealth and richness lies. All wine needs is attention: the chance to speak for itself, and to be heard.