Roland Lavantureux runs a small domaine in Chablis, not just growing his family’s Chardonnay grapes but also bottling their produce. He recently worked out that it would almost make financial sense for him to pull the cork on every bottle in his cellars and sell their contents in bulk to one of the army of small négociants (people who produce wine from bought-in grapes and wine) that has mushroomed in Burgundy, so crazily high are bulk wine prices in the world’s favourite fine wine region.
Burgundy, particularly its heartland the Côte d’Or, has reached a crossroads. Since the Middle Ages when viticulture was in the hands of the monasteries, it has produced small quantities of wine from tiny parcels of vines. The increasing number of wine tourists in Burgundy has come to revere the timeless stone villages and their horny-handed vignerons who know every vine and importer personally. The contrast with the more hard-headed scale of production in Bordeaux is stark. Bordeaux’s extensive estates are increasingly owned by banks and insurance companies, and run by smooth executives. Their produce passes through so many middle men that the best-known wines have been transformed from drinks into investment vehicles. Bordeaux prices have soared to such an extent that, for the moment anyway, fine wine buyers seem to have lost interest in buying futures in them – which has led to a dramatic reduction in the amount of money to be made trading these wines.
Meanwhile the Asian markets, tiring of a Bordeaux-only diet, have pounced on Burgundy with its much more elastic pricing. Add to this three short crops in a row – 2011, 2012 and 2013 – and you have a very small honeypot and an increasingly large and excited swarm of bees.