FRANCE HEADING TOWARDS A VERY SMALL HARVEST :

As the 2008 harvest begins in the vineyards, Viniflhor estimates the French yield at 43,6 million hectolitres to be one of the smallest in recent history.

This September the more the wine growers look to the sky, the more worried they get. Indeed, after a wet Spring and Summer, the Indian Summer many had hoped for is not to be. Just as it wasn't in 2007. Furthermore, the weather forecast for the coming days is not promising...
This year, rain stole the show instead of the sun. This was all too apparent yesterday at Château Haut-Brion, first classified growth of Pessac-Léognan in the suburbs of Bordeaux, where 40 pickers waited all morning for the rain to stop. It never did, and not a single bunch of Sauvignon blanc was harvested. Even though sun had been forecast...

On the spot experts notice the number of bunches diminishing (victim to mildew) and, as time goes on, the yield estimates plummet. Yesterday Viniflhor (ex Onivins), national office for the wine industry, announced an estimate of 43,6 million hectolitres for the total French production. On the 1st of August, the Ministry of Agriculture's statistics department had put the estimate at 46 million...

Lowest yield since 1991 : If these 43,6 million hl are confirmed, France will record it's smallest harvest since 1991, year of the killer frost which froze the young shoots in April on thousands of vines along the Atlantic coast. That year only 42,6 million hl went into the fermentation vats.

The regional vineyards are no exception to this phenomenon. In the Charentes area the yield is expected to reach 6,6 million hl, only slightly above last year's already historically low yield. "Much more important than volume is the degree of sugar hence potential alcohol content for the production of Cognac. 8,9 or 10? Impossible to predict yet as the harvest will begin in October. Unfortunately this close, wet weather favours the developement of mildew," explains a technician.
In Gironde, the yield predicted is approximately 5,3 million hl, the lowest since 1991. It's a similar story for other production areas such as the Dordogne, Lot-et-Garonne and Midi-Pyrénées. This volume analysis cannot of course predict the level of quality for this vintage, even though it is certain that it will not be a superb one, far from that...

Tension rises over prices : Many quality criterion can yet come into play : the weather in the next few weeks, selective harvesting, selection between the different wines, the producers technical savoir-faire...Tasting only will tell....
The effect on the prices however, is already being felt : wholesale transactions for white wine in bulk are on the increase. "As for the reds, it's like a game of cat and mouse between merchants and growers", says a professional.
Regarding consumers, it is feared that prices will rise in the next few months, despite fierce competition amongst distributors, due to higher production costs (for low volumes, as in 2007) and to the fact that these last two vintages have been extremely expensive in terms of work and treatment in the vineyard : frequent spraying to save the harvest with increasingly expensive products, higher gasoline and bottle glass prices.....
Far from a barrel of laughs for French wine growers.


César Compadre

doc@sudouest.com


S.O. 10/09/08
Translated by Maxine Colas.

WHEN GLASS TALKS :

OLD VINTAGES : Bordeaux researchers have perfected a method of dating the glass of wine bottles. A step further in the fight against fraud :

Last week a couple from the Bouches-du-Rhone region were arrested for having sold, via the Ebay auction website, 200 bottles of so-called Grand Cru French wines which turned out to be fancy bottles filled for the most part with very ordinary wine...
Visually, it is difficult to tell a great wine from an ordinary one and so the temptation to falsify is great.
"Especially as the market for old vintage wines is thriving," says Angélique de Lencquesaing, one of the founders of the website www.idealwine.com in 2000. This company which employs 12 people and is based in the Paris area, provides a service of quoting values of vintage wines. "Our experience helps to authenticate bottles : glass, scanned labels, capsules pierced by syringes to top up wine levels...But these new techniques can provide a plus only if the price remains acceptable", she explains.

Important discovery : In today's select market for old wines, a spectacular discovery has just been made by researchers at the Bordeaux Centre For Nuclear Studies (CNRS/Bordeaux 1) in Gradignan. This centre, employing a staff of one hundred, has been studying composition and structure of matter since 1967. The research team, led by Hervé Guégan, has finally perfected, after two years of work, a unique system of dating the glass of a wine bottle by subjecting it to a beam of ions produced by the particle accelerator based at the Gradignan centre. "Thanks to our analysis of over a hundred glass bottles containing Bordeaux wine from the 18th century onwards, we now possess a database of all the different techniques used by glass-makers in the past. For example, since 1957 manganese is no longer a componant in glass", explains Hervé Guégan, who is the head of Arcane, the department for technological transfer for the Gradignan laboratory. Mr Guégan's mission is clearly to communicate the value of their discoveries to the private sector.

In order to complete this database which initially enables the researchers to define time slots of fifteen years, Hervé Guégan analyses bottles of wine from ten or so of the greatest Bordeaux estates, from the most valued vintages (1890, 1892, 1929, 1945, 1961, 1982, 1990, 2000,.).
Some of these wines sell for astronomical prices in auctions.*
In its capacity to confirm the authenticity of age and provenance of these bottles, Arcane has signed a contract with "The Antique Wine Company", the London specialist in old, rare wines. In November, a new company named Vincert SARL will deliver authentification certificates to traders and buyers alike who wish to allay any doubts about rare bottles. This certificate should be worth approximately 500 euros. In the art world where such certificates guaranteeing authenticity rarely exceed 5 to 10% of the product's value, this service is aimed at a market for bottles worth over 5,000 euros a piece...To give an idea of price range, Idealwine values a Lafite Rothschild 1982 at 1,600 euros per bottle and a Mouton Rothschild 1945 at 7,000 euros.

Checking the wine : This new dating method for glass is an additional weapon in the arsenal of tests available to professionals and the government in the war against fraud. In 2002 researcher Philippe Hubert, also based at the centre in Gradignan, developed a technique which detects the presence of the chemical substance Cesium 137 in wine. This chemical is a result of nuclear weapons tests which began in 1945.
Wine definately has a memory, as proves the correlation between the quantity of Cesium 137 it contains (which is analysed without opening the bottle) and the period during which the wine was produced. The only drawback with this method of analysis also used to check the provenance of prunes and mushrooms, is that one cannot go back farther than the year 1950. Research continues and tomorrow we may see the use of carbon for dating.


César Compadre

doc@sudouest.com


S.O. 09/09/08
Translated by Maxine Colas.

*See the book "The Billionaire's Vinegar" by Benjamin Wallace.