Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

IT LIVES! My two 500 liter barrels of Riesling picked in the early morning of Monday, 17th September in the Nonnberg site of Wicker/Rheingau are now both fermenting. Both barrels were filled with the same must late on the evening of the day of harvest. The one at the front of the picture is very slowly undergoing spontaneous or wild fermentation, while the one behind it was inoculated with Heiligenstein yeast and is fermenting much faster. The goal is a bone dry wine and based on the most weight of 95° Oechsle (straight from the press) I expect the wine to weigh in at around 13% alcohol. Due to a pH of 3.5 in the must, which means very low acidity, I felt there was no option, but to add 1.5 grams per liter of tartaric acid. Some of you will hate me for doing that, because it’s not “natural”, but if I hadn’t done that the danger of an unwanted malolactic fermentation would have been high, and then the wine might have ended up tasting like melted butter. This is Riesling, not warm climate Chardonnay, so no thank you!

Sadly, there’s no point in describing how the fermenting wine tastes now, because it will change from day to day or even hour to hour. I will start talking about the aromas and flavors after alcoholic fermentation is completed and a small amount of sulfites have been added to prevent oxidation. I want the finished wine to live for at least a decade and for that there’s no serious alternative to adding sulfites. Then the wine and its flavors will gain a certain stability. I won’t be hurrying to add that sulfur though (by the way, none was added either to either the grapes or the must), because the longer it is delayed the more chance the wine has for positive aromatic development.

As those of you who have been following my work in the 6 rows of Riesling vines I borrowed for the year from Reiner Flick of the Flick estate already know, I am making this wine for Wein Weiblich aka Wine, Women, Rhine the movie. De facto I am in competition with four talented young professional women winemakers, each of whom is also making a 2017 vintage dry Riesling in front of the movie camera. As the only amateur winemaker in the group I am clearly the one who’s wine is most likely to bomb out in the final scene of the movie: a blind tasting of the finished products at Restaurant Heimat in Frankfurt in early July 0f 2019. At the beginning I was sure that I could only fail that test, then I acquired a very capable assistant called Peam Saisombat and that changed the calculation of my chances quite considerably. She is from Thailand where she already has a degree in agricultural science and is studying winemaking at the Geisenheim Wine University.

Here we are together in the vineyard after the end of a hard day’s work. To give you an idea of how precise Peam’s vineyard work is here are a few photographs she took to document work she did alone in the vineyard (necessary when I was in Spain in late June and in Italy in August for JamesSuckling.com). The first photograph shows the result of twisting the vine shoots around the top wires rather than cutting the tips off them as conventional winegrowers do. The theory behind not cutting the growing shoot tips is that they provide competition for energy and nutrients to the developing bunches, which remain smaller and looser than would normally be the case if the tips remain intact. The contrast to the rows of vines on the left of the photograph that Reiner Flick’s team cultivated is immediately obvious. The canopy of our vines is lower and I am sure that during the long hot and dry months of the summer they used less water than the vines on the left.

Something else that we did that was different to Reiner Flick was to “halve” the bunches of grapes that struck us as being too fat and compact. Because I was on the road Peam did this by herself. No knife was necessary, just two hands a sharp eye (which she certainly has!) She grasped the upper part of the bunch with her left hand, then twisted off the lower third with her right hand. The theory is that shocked by the wound this inflicts on the vine it tries to compensate for the lost fruit by stretching the bunch, which once again loosens it. A loose bunch is much less likely to rot and the berries at the back of it also get more light exposure. Here’s a picture that also gives an idea of how this procedure also reduced the yield somewhat. In fact, ripening as measured through the sugar content of the grapes progressed rather fast until the drought pulled on the brakes somewhat at the beginning of September. However, I feel pretty sure from the way the grapes tasted at harvest that the aromatic development during the last couple of weeks before harvest continued apace.

2018 is a really extreme vintage thanks to the heat and drought. My gut tells me that in some vineyards quality will be low because the vines were too stressed during the summer. My guess is that this will not only vary from village to village, but also from vineyard plot to vineyard plot depending on how well each has been tended over the last years. I think the special conditions in Wicker (in particular the very water-retentive soil), Reiner Flick’s very thoughtful cultivation and our own hard work prevented us being affected by that problem. If the very generous yield – much higher than 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014 0r 2013 – impacts quality is difficult to say now. The entire harvest team was in agreement that the grapes tasted really good at picking and we removed every berry we could find (it was only isolated berries) that looked less than perfect. It was less than 1% of the fruit!

The next posting will be all about how the two barrels of fermented wine actually smell and taste. I am expecting them to be very different from each other and hope that some kind of blend of the two will be best. It might be a 50/50 blend or maybe an 80/20. We shall have to wait and see. For more information WATCH THIS SPACE or go to:

www.wein-weiblich.de

Für den Dokumentarfilm WEIN WEIBLICH arbeite ich dieses Jahr im Weinberg. Hier meine Gedanken zum zentralen Thema des Weinbaus: Schlamm. Wer interessiert ist unseren Projekt zu unterstützen kann auf den Link zu unseren Crowdfunding klicken. / This year for the documentary movie WINE, WOMEN, RHINE I’m cultivating a small vineyard in the Nonnberg site of Wicker at the eastern end of the Rheingau. Here, in German, are my thoughts on the vital subject of mud. I hope to be able to provide an English translation shortly. Anyone interested in supporting us should click on this link:

www.startnext.com/weinweiblich

DER SCHLAMM UND ICH

Scheiße! Der Schlamm hier im Weinberg schluckte mich und will mich nicht wieder los lassen. Wie ist das mir, einem Journalisten, der normalerweise Weine am Schreibtisch aus feinen Gläsern testet, passiert? Wie wurde dieser Schreibtisch-Tiger in ein Nilpferd verwandelt das fest im Schlamm steckt?

Es passierte mir nachdem ich heute anfing in „meinem“ Weinberg zu arbeiten. Das sind sechs Rebzeilen in der Spitzenlage Nonnberg, einem sanften Hang nahe der kleinen Weinstadt Wicker am unbekannten östlichen Rand des Rheingaus. Diesen Weinberg habe ich von dem Winzer Reiner Flick für dieses Jahr geliehen. Schon innerhalb einiger wenigen Minuten hafteten fette Klumpen von Schlamm an meinen Stiefeln. Meine Füße fühlte sich fünf Kilo schwerer und doppelt so breit an wie vorher. Noch schlimmer: egal wie ich meine Stiefel schüttelte klebten die Schlamm-Massen fest daran! Wie soll ich so arbeiten?

Wenn der Normalo an Weinbau denkt, dann kommt ihm ganz was anderes in den Sinn. Er sieht prächtige Bilder von der Weinlese im goldenen Herbst: goldenes Reblaub und goldene Trauben! Wegen der warmen Sonne des Altweibersommers sind alle Lesehelfer leicht bekleidet und fröhlich. So kann es im glücklichen Fall auch vorkommen, aber dies hier ist die nicht weniger reale verschlammte Kehrseite davon.

Als ich das erste mal hier arbeitete, vor zweieinhalb Wochen, herrschte Frühling. Die Sonne schien, es war mild, der Boden war trocken und blieb unter meinen Füßen stehen, statt sie zu verschlingen. Das waren angenehme Arbeitsbedingungen für den Rebschnitt – die erste große Arbeit des Winzerjahres – und ich kam dementsprechend gut damit voran. Und das, obwohl ich nur mit einer alten Rebschere ausgestattet war und aus der Übung bin. Vor neun Jahren schnitt ich zum letzten mal eine Rebe! Wie geht das?

Es ist schon schwierig genug mit einem solchen Gerät ein Stück Rebholz, welches zwei Zentimeter dick ist, durchzuschneiden. Um das zu schaffen muss man mit der Schere fest drücken und mit dem Ding „schaukeln“. Danach hat eine Dusche gut getan und ich litt unter etwas Muskelkater, aber ich war gut drauf – statt einem Häufchen Elend, wie ich mich jetzt fühle.

Lange Zeit war Schlamm dafür verantwortlich, dass Winzer kein cooler Beruf war. Das gute Gesellschaft hat alle Arten von Landwirtschaft für unter ihrer Würde betrachtet. Nach wie vor verstehen die wenigsten von ihnen überhaupt die Unterschiede zwischen Boden, Schlamm, Kompost, Mist und Scheiße, weil sie sich nicht damit auseinandersetzen wollen. Statt dessen neigen Normalos dazu sie alle als „Dreck“ zu bezeichnen, was fachlich gesehen Quatsch ist. Trotzdem ist Winzer Anfang des 21ten Jahrhunderts ein cooler Beruf geworden, weil es als kreativ gilt, bzw. in „Winemaking“ oder „Wein machen“ umgetauft wurde.

Das ist jetzt auch meine Aufgabe. Ich muss einen trockenen Weißwein aus der Riesling-Traube für den Film WEIN WEIBLICH erzeugen. Ich bin natürlich kein Weib aber die vier weiblichen Hauptfiguren des Films haben verlangt, dass ich genau das für die Kamera mache was sie auch tun. Und das habe ich anstandslos zugesagt, auch weil ich nicht diesen Schlamm erwartet habe. Meine vorherigen Übungen mit Weinbau waren in Lagen mit steinigen oder sandigen Böden die tendenziell nicht in fetten Klumpen an meinem Schuhwerk hafteten.

Das hier ist aber wirklich Winemaking! Denn ohne diese Arbeit tragen die Reben keine reifen Trauben und ohne reife Trauben gibt es keinen Wein – Basta! Aber auch ich verbinde Winemaking meistens mit schönen Holzfässern in einem prächtigen Weinkeller, aus dem Schmutz in jeglicher Art verbannt wurde. Auch vor meinem inneren Auge ist eine Probe des edlen Weins, die der Winemaker mit einer langen gläsernen Pipette aus dem Fass zieht, strahlend klar. Das ist natürlich so weit weg von Schlamm wie man sich nur vorstellen kann und das ist auch mein Ziel.

Der Weg zum Ziel ist aber auch für mich lang und „dreckig“. Mein Wein wird hoffentlich in etwas über einem Jahr genau so aussehen wenn ich eine Probe mit der langen gläsernen Pipette aus „meinem„ 500 Liter Holzfass im Keller vom Weingut Flick in Wicker ziehen werde. Dummerweise verwandeln sich Trauben nicht von selbst schlagartig in trinkfertige Weine verwandeln.

Zuerst muss der Most aus den Trauben durch die Kelterung gewonnen werden, was eine Menge Überreste (Beerenhaut, -Kerne und der Stilgerüst) hinterlässt, die schnell zu Matsch werden können. Dann vergärt die Hefe den Most zum Wein, was aber auch zu einer ganzen Menge schlammartigen Depots, bzw. tote Hefe führt. Das muss von dem jungen Wein getrennt werden, was auch nicht so einfach ist. Erst Monate nach der Traubenernte herrscht im Keller DAS was der Normalo unter Sauberkeit versteht. Dann folgt die Abfüllung, was wiederum zu anderen Arten von Schlamm führt. Aber dann hört es endlich damit auf!

Aber bevor ich damit überhaupt anfangen kann, muss ich x-mal während der nächsten sieben bis acht Monate hier im Weinberg arbeiten. Da die Rebe nicht wie Korn wächst, sondern eine ganz Menge Pflege erfordert, habe ich sehr viel Arbeit vor mir. Mal wird das Wetter schön sein und die Arbeit daher schlammlos, aber manchmal wird es eher nass sein und ich werde mich wieder in ein Nilpferd verwandeln. Wie gut das Ergebnis schmecken wird kann ich Ihnen jetzt leider keinesfalls voraussagen, weil die Qualität des Weins zum guten Teil vom Herbstwetter abhängt. Im Gegensatz zu schnöder Büroarbeit ist das Ganze unglaublich hart und ziemlich unberechenbar.

Wie mein guter Freund, der Rockstar James Maynard Keenan (Sänger von der Heavy Metal Gruppe Tool und von seiner eigenen Band Puscifer) der auch Winzer in Arizona ist (Caduceus Cellars & Merkin Vineyards) oft sagt: „Rock Musik ist Chaos. Weinbau ist Chaos. Wenn Du keinen Chaos verträgst lass die Finger von den beiden!“ Aber er ist süchtig nach Winemaking und ich bin es inzwischen auch. Wir Winzer nehmen den Schlamm im Kauf, weil manchmal kommt ein Wein raus der so genial ist, dass fast jeder Trinker so was sagt wie, „Wow! So was habe ich noch nie im Leben geschmeckt!“ Dafür kämpfe ich mich weiter durch den Schlamm.

Oh je! Jetzt fängt es an zu regnen und das Wasser fließt mir den Nacken runter…

Yesterday, my assistant Peam Saisombat, a young Thai woman studying winemaking at the famous Geisenheim wine university, and I pruned 6 rows of Riesling vines in the Nonnberg site of Weingut Flick in Wicker at the eastern end of the Rheingau. Reiner Flick has leant to us them for the rest of this year so I can make a Riesling wine from in his cellars. And we’re doing all that in front of the camera for the feature length documentary film WEIN WEIBLICH.

The deeper I get into this beautiful and crazy thing the more I ask myself how did I get in so far so fast? Yes, I live in Germany and I’ve been writing about wine every since I arrived here a quarter of a century ago, but I’m not a young woman winemaker on the Rhine, and that’s what WEIN WEIBLICH is all about. How should I translate that title into English? Literally, it means wine womanly, but I feel happier with Wine, Women & Rhine because it tells you about the three essential ingredients of this revolutionary project. Revolutionary? Which other movie showed in gritty close-up how vines are cultivated and wine is made with a predominantly female cast? None that I know. For more information see our German language website:

https://wein-weiblich.de

I can’t deny that right from the beginning I never hesitated, and from the moment that Marco Schulze first pointed his camera in my direction in Restaurant Heimat in Frankfurt on December 6^th, 2017 there was no turning back. In spite of that, there’s also no doubt that Christoph Koch and Gunnar Swanson of the film production company frames2art are equally responsible for my current predicament. We’re all guilty as charged!

Guilty? Yes, of taking the feminization of wine in Germany seriously. I remember that around 1990 I got my first commissions from magazines to write stories about women winemakers. At the time this seemed like an important thing to do, because there were rather few of them and they often struggled for recognition. However, during the next decade the situation for women in the German wine industry changed dramatically for the better. As a result I changed approach to watching out I didn’t miss the talented, then treating them exactly like the guys. In spite of this when I began a year as a guest student in Geisenheim/Rheingau in October 2008 I was pleasantly surprised to find nearly half the students were women. Now they’ve got a better position in the German wine industry than in that of almost any other major wine producing country. But why make a movie about all that?

I don’t think it would have happened if I hadn’t met Christoph and Marco back in the spring of 2007 at the Darmstadt/Germany HQ of the email-provider T-Online. There, with a minimum of technology and time we shot what is still my most successful YouTube video (see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8J8tBreHTQ) with around 10,000 views. Not bad considering it’s in German without English subtitles. I returned to that studio a couple of times and developed a great creative relationship with them, but then our paths separated. Fast forward to an Italian Café in Wiesbaden on February 9^th, 2017 and my first conversation with Christoph in a decade. He convinced me that although I was very well aware of the wine winemakers the wider public’s awareness of the feminization of wine was lagging well behind. That provided compelling logic for his proposal to shoot a 100 – 120 minute movie introducing the world to this social and cultural change in Germany.

Now I’m in the same filmmaking boat with four successful thirty-something women winemakers: Theresa Breuer of the Georg Breuer estate in Rüdeheim/Rheingau, Dr. Eva Vollmer of the eponymous estate in Mainz-Ebersheim/Rheinhessen, Katharina Wechsler of the eponymous estate in Westhofen/Rheinhessen and Silke Wolf of Shelter Winery in Kenzingen/Baden. Their names are familiar to anyone who closely follows the astonishing renaissance of the German wine industry since the last turn of the century (the most important theme of my writing).

When we told this quartet we wanted to follow them over a period of about 18 months as they each produced a dry Riesling wine, from pruning of the vines through to the finished wine being tasted for the first time (in July 2019) they accepted the challenge, but collectively demanded I do the same thing. It’s true I once made an experimental wine but it was a dry Müller-Thurgau and that was back in 2009. That’s why yesterday, I suddenly found myself with a pair of old vine pruning shears in my hand. So help me God!

German wine usually comes in six packs, so we decided to add a young woman winemaker at the very beginning of her career to add a yet younger perspective. A casting day at the wine university in Geisenheim left us with an extremely difficult choice, because we had 10 strong candidates for this role. Finally, we decided in favor of 27 year old Carolin Weiler of the tiny Weiler estate in Lorch/Rheingau who abandoned a career as a kindergarten teacher to study wine with the goal of taking over her family winery. Another of the candidates, Peam Saisombat, became my assistant, and that made me feel a lot more confident about making my first ever Riesling.

All of this is unusual enough, but the way we have, financially speaking, thrown ourselves off the trapeze without a safety net is completely new to me. From spring 2010 through fall 2012 I co-wrote and anchored eighteen TV shows (30 minutes each) called Weinwunder Deutschland together with director Alexander Saran. That project was bankrolled by BR, the state TV network of Bavaria and was my largest source of income during that period. We started shooting WEIN WEIBLICH without any of the approximately 80.000 Euros we need to complete the project, a figure that doesn’t include any pay for the core team of Christoph, Gunnar and I, or for the women winemakers!

We seriously need your help. By giving us your financial support, however large or small, you will become part of our team and be able to follow our work on this daring documentary movie. Please visit out crowd funding page at:

www.startnext.com/weinweiblich

Who doesn’t want to taste the best wine in the world? One theory says the only possible way to do this is to go straight to Burgundy/France, do not pass Go and do not collect $200. At JamesSuckling.com we don’t roll quite like that, but we’re open for all the wines of the world including Burgundy, so in January we spent some fascinating and hectic days tasting in the region.

In Burgundy I keep bumping into winemaker and somm friends from far away and it happened three times last time! The first time I was crossing the Place Carnot, the central square of Beaune when voila there was Norman Hardie – pictured above – my favorite producer of Chardonnay (the signature grapes of Burgundy) in Ontario/Canada. “Norm” greeted me warmly and introduced me to his two hip young companions.

One of them then said to me with enormous gravitas and no hint of irony, „so you came to worship at the shrine.” It was a statement not a question, because the hipster was sure Burgundy is holy. When I answered, “no, JamesSuckling.com and I aren’t interested in Holy Burgundy. We’re interested in the Real Thing, the real place and the real wines!” the young Burgundy Buddha was deeply shocked. How could that be? NO!!!

No other wine-producing region in the world is more idealized and more weighed down by myths than Burgundy. That wouldn’t matter – we believe in the freedom to worship whichever God you want! – if it wasn’t for the way this helps inflate wine prices and promote misconceptions about this beautiful and historic region. Burgundy is famously all about “terroir”, the French word for the taste of the place, but often that’s presented as a mystery so profound only Burgundy Buddhas can even begin to understand it.

We’ve got nothing against a bit of mystery spun around wine, but the truth is that terroir mostly expresses itself in the particular balance between the major flavor components – aromas, body, tannins and acidity – of each wine. On top of this, not even a Burgundy Buddha can separate the influence of the vineyard site from that of the winemaker and the vintage, because each wine is necessarily the product of their interaction. How this plays out in hundreds of wines from the 2016 and 2015 vintages is what makes the new JamesSuckling.com Burgundy report so interesting. Here is the link to it:

Great Burgundy You Can Actually Buy: 2015 and 2016 Shine

For us the problems arise when some people, particularly people whose job it is to sell these products start complicate everything in order to make the wines seem more special than any wine can ever be. The result is not only a culture of veneration, but also explanations for the wines that are as convoluted and narrow as the Medieval streets of the region’s towns and villages. And I promise you they are extremely convoluted!

Again and again we’ve been told by Burgundy Buddhas that the wines of this region are horribly difficult to understand, although the classification system – regional wines, village wines, Premier Cru vineyards then Grand Cru vineyards – is actually as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4. We recommend you treat the hysterical adulation of and holy-than-thou marketing hyperbole for Burgundy with the same healthy degree of skepticism that we do.

Norman Hardie and his two cool companions also reminded me of the other huge problem for this region. “Where did you taste this morning?” I asked them on the Place Carnot. “Oh, the best! We were at Domaine Coche-Dury,” he answered. And it’s true that no white Burgundy wines have a higher reputation around Planet Wine than those from Coche-Dury. “Of course, we didn’t ask if we could buy a bottle,” Norm told me, and that’s equally true. Try to buy a bottle of Coche-Dury in one of the luxury wine stores on the Place Carnot and you’ll either draw a blank or you’ll pay many times the price that the lucky few with an allocation at the domaine do. Norm goes there because although the Coche-Dury wines taste totally different to his own he finds inspiration in them. Of course, that’s great.

The cult surrounding the wines of this domaine, along with those of many other famous Burgundy domaines, is so extreme that even the world’s leading restaurants can’t buy from importers anywhere near the quantity they need to keep the wines on their lists year round. Aldo Sohm, the humble chief sommelier of Le Bernardin in New York explained that situation to me. He told me he has no choice but to scour the secondary market for every bottle he can find, “and, of course, I’m not the only person doing that!” This is one of the factors pushing prices for the wines of the most famous Burgundy domaines up from the stratosphere towards outer space.

What relevance would ratings JamesSuckling.com have for a totally over-heated market like that have? We humbly suggest the answer to this question is, “absolutely none”. And as you will see from our report there are other producers whose wines are rather widely distributed, so that you can buy them in the normal way! Some of them taste so good I’d consider licking them up off the floor!

PS There’s a prize for anyone who can recognize the Burgundian tasting room floor in the picture below!

As you can see from the photograph above, taken by Nick Stock on January 15th at Château Lafite Rothschild, after steering clear of red Bordeaux for quite a few  years #bordeauxisback and I’m getting back into Bordeaux with enthusiasm. My lack of interest for red Bordeaux during the decade beginning 2006 had a lot to do with the high prices asked for the excellent 2005, 2009 and 2010 vintages. Since then prices shifted back down to more reasonable levels while prices in a bunch of other regions specialized in high-end reds continued to head skywards.

During my three tours of the region since November 2016 and most recently in January 2018 with the JamesSuckling.com team I found plenty of excellent wines in the Euro 10 – 50 range from the 2014, 2015 and 2016 vintages. It’s a long time since Bordeaux had so much excellent wine to offer! I also came to the conclusion that as long as legendary wines like Château Lafite Rothschild also taste legendary there’s no problem with three figure Euro prices. “Expensive” is one of the most elastic words out there, not least because it’s so personal – you decide! – and often depends on both situation and mood.

The other reason for my renewed enthusiasm for Bordeaux is that after some pretty wild stylistic exaggerations that had a lot to do with certain producers trying to cash in Robert Parker’s then enormous influence upon the market there’s been a return to sanity. The long Parker Period is not only over, it’s starting to feel like history. When I was in Bordeaux in January with James Suckling and Nick Stock tasting primarily the 2015 vintage wines in bottle for JamesSuckling.com, I frequently felt a connection between the new wines and the best I tasted when I was introduced to red Bordeaux in London back in the early 1980s. The best comparison is with the string of 1982 cask samples I was lucky to taste (although the 2014s are lighter, the 2015s crisper and the 2016 firmer than those wines). Small quantities of 1982s – I was a poor art student – were amongst my first wine purchases not destined for immediate consumption.

Wines with dominant new oak aromas are now as rare in Bordeaux as those that are massively extracted, both techniques that attempt to magnify the stature of red wines. I’m sure that reverse osmosis concentration and micro-oxidation machines are still being used in some cellars, but today none of the winemakers treat them as short cuts to high quality as was once the case. Sure, some winemakers are picking the grapes later than I would if I was in their shoes, but that’s not manipulation, rather an aesthetic decision on the part of the winemaker. It helps create the wonderful stylistic diversity in Bordeaux.

The result of this is not only well balanced wines with an attractive freshness (very pronounced in 2015), but also that taste of their appellations and sometimes have a clear vineyard character. There’s so much character that it would be possible to write lengthy stories about a bunch of individual producers scattered throughout the region. Isn’t that what we’re looking for? For quite a large chunk of the wine scene in the West the answer seems to be “NO!” in this case, because for them Bordeaux is passé. I’m talking particularly about those somms, journalists and merchants focused on so-called “natural” and orange wines. For many of them red Bordeaux is an industrial and elitist product that’s grossly over-priced. To me it looks like they talked themselves into this corner, and often they can’t really explain why they see the region that way.

I humbly advise anyone who hasn’t taken Bordeaux seriously during recent years to study the reports on the 2014, 2015 and 2016 vintages on JamesSuckling.com because there’s so many stunning wines out there, some for friendly prices. Here’s a link to the report on the 2015s in bottle. Enjoy!

Bordeaux is Really Back with 2015

After this was published and I announced its posting on Facebook Annette Schiller (of Ombiasy Public Relations and Wine Tours) made a comment that’s  makes some important additional points, and I therefore quote it in full:

“I totally agree with Stuart Pigott. The image of Bordeaux as a wine region that is for a big part in the hands of international companies that reign over huge wineries is simply not true. There are about 7,500 producers in Bordeaux. Only 8% have more than 100 ha; only 3.5% of wines are more expensive than 15 Euro per bottle, only 1.25% of Châteaux belong to the classified ones that make headlines in the news. There is an ocean of dedicated, quality driven producers – the so called “petits Châteaux” who struggle to make ends meet. Just last night we opened a 1987 Château du Grand Bois, Lalande de Pomerol and a 1997 Châteaux Beauséjour, Puisseguin – Saint-Émilion of our friend Gérard Dupuis whose father was a pioneer in the late 1940s to convert to biodynamic winemaking. Both wines were excellent, no teenagers anymore but wonderful mature adults, and did not break our bank. I truly love the Bordeaux wine region and Bordeaux wines.”

And just to show that I don’t only use eccentric photos, here is a more conventional one showing Nick Stock (second from left), James Suckling (third from left) and I (far right) with members of the Château Lafite Rothschild team.