The problem with Bordeaux – and how to fix it

Anyone who identifies as a wine lover will be familiar with The Question. It’ll pursue you all your life. It’s innocent and often charmingly asked. What, the questioner wants to know, is your favourite wine? I smile glassily at this point, for two reasons.

The first is that I don’t have a favourite wine.

What I love about wine is diversity and difference. If I say that, though, my questioner will think it’s a cop-out. So I reply ‘red Bordeaux’ instead. ‘Bordeaux? Bordeaux?’ Disappointment mingles with amazement.

‘That’s so boring! You’re a wine expert: can’t you give me a name that will change my drinking forever?’

Red Bordeaux may be the most obvious, unoriginal and unhip ‘favourite wine’ in existence, but at its best it’s also the most subtle, refined and complex red wine of all.

It’s the most food-friendly, the most successful in terms of accomplishing metamorphosis with age, the most qualitatively consistent across a broad price spectrum, the most generous in terms of market offer, the most profoundly satisfying, and (a personal view) the most digestible and health-bringing wine of all.

Scroll down for Andrew Jefford’s suggestions for Bordeaux

Sorry: that’s my truth. Thirty years of annual visits to Bordeaux (I’ll be back again by the time you read this), interspersed with wildly diverse wine-tasting and wine-drinking comparisons, have proved the point repeatedly.

Oh, and Sauternes also happens to be my favourite sweet-wine indulgence (in half-bottles, as a luscious aperitif), and dry white Bordeaux, too, can be ineffably classy so long as its producer hasn’t given Sauvignon Blanc too much of an upper hand. I love these wines.

In researching a piece called ‘Why do we keep coming back to Bordeaux?’ for Decanter’s 2023 annual Bordeaux guide, I sounded out wine- loving friends and contacts around the world about their feelings for Bordeaux. The response was a shock. Volley after volley of criticism strafed my inbox.

Many of those I contacted seemed to feel disengaged, bored or excluded by Bordeaux; some appeared to resent it. Analysis of their responses, though, suggested it wasn’t always the wine that met with opprobrium, but rather everything that clustered around it: its ‘Bordeaux- ness’.

Bordeaux, in other words, seemed to be its own worst enemy. Why? Here’s an anatomy.

The image problem

Bordeaux comes at you like an army in uniform. The bottles are all the same shape: square- shouldered and masculine. The labels, locked into a thousand typographic iterations of conservative ‘elegance’, seem exclusionary and forbidding. Virtually every domain is called Château, adding to the sense of regimented homogeneity.

The back labels don’t tell any stories; the human is nowhere evident on a bottle of Bordeaux. All we’re given is a set of tight-lipped classificatory codes aimed at initiates.

The result? These are wines that seem to despise both their purchasers and the workers who helped make them. The retail customer’s curiosity is met by veiled grandeur alone.

If you’re not an insider, the haughty bottles seem to say, then clear off.

Yes: the wine is indeed made by hard work and gnarled hands, by ceaseless struggle against a capricious climate. Good and great Bordeaux exists because of the dedication of the men and women who make it. Those who accomplish this work, though, are invisible on bottles of Bordeaux: never seen, never referenced.

So who are the gatekeepers? Urbane white men, as often as not, with soft hands and expensive educations. Visitors to Bordeaux properties today don’t meet workers; they meet well-drilled hosts and hostesses with scripted messages.

Sommeliers – to whom inauthenticity smells as bad as TCA – have become disenchanted with Bordeaux over the last two decades, notably in Bordeaux itself, where ambitious wine lists feature more Loire or northern Rhône wines than they do wines from Margaux or Pomerol.

Around the world, the most passionately curated lists tend to feature a larger selection of wines from tiny Jura than from vast Bordeaux. The somm message is clear: Bordeaux is tired and boring.

The enigma of terroir

If the world loves French wine, it’s because of terroir: French word, French concept, French dream. It’s worth billions of euros annually to the nation. Burgundy’s famous classification pyramid furnishes the global paradigm: single vineyards anatomised into levels (from the top down) of grand cru, premier cru, village (including lieux-dit sites), sub-region and region.

The parcellaires of the Rhône and the Loire chase Burgundy in hot pursuit; Alsace is slowly refining its own pyramid.

It may be complex, but consumers can relate to a pyramid. The vineyard is the interpretive fulcrum, even if it’s divided into multiple ownership. We see the vineyard; it can be photographed; we get it.

Terroir in Bordeaux, by contrast, is opaque, an inscrutable mosaic hiding behind château names, behind blends, behind large and homogenous appellation zones, behind a crust of classifications (with or without periodic revisions). The interpretive fulcrum in Bordeaux is never the vineyard – it’s the property.

The effect of this is to substitute brand for terroir. Note that this isn’t necessarily to the region’s disadvantage: the power of a key château brand makes ‘range extensions’ based on lesser vineyard purchases eminently possible, and most consumers are used to building relationships with brands.

Truly learning about vineyard terroir in a region as colossal as Bordeaux would be a significant challenge. Of course, too, quality distinctions in Bordeaux (from which brands draw their strength) are based on the revelation of terroir over time. Every ‘Château’ offers consumers a brand anchored in terroir.

But the terroir focus is soft, hazy and tentative, and communication about it is weak. Curious consumers hunting for details and facts will find the pompous, grandiose websites of leading châteaux frustrating.

In our authenticity-obsessed times, and at a moment when every actor in the wine world is struggling ‘to let the vineyard speak’, this failure leaves many of the world’s most committed wine consumers unsatisfied.

User-unfriendly

Bordeaux whips its drinkers over hurdles. Let’s begin with the classic 12-bottle wooden claret box: a beautiful object, but heavy and difficult to open (sometimes dangerous, being held together by metal pins and prone to splintering). Clearly a job best left to one’s butler.

Because red Bordeaux is the world’s most ageworthy wine, most consumers assume that even modest bottles of Bordeaux must be ‘cellared’; they’re reinforced in that opinion by critics’ suggested drinking dates. This counsel of perfection is wonderfully dissuasive: few of us have cool cellars and endless patience.

Professional storage? Those with the desire to bury capital for 20 years while they watch the en primeur price gently tank form a shrinking minority of wine lovers. Did you take a punt on Bordeaux in the great vintages of 2005, ’09 or ’10? Sorry, but in most cases you’d have done far better to put the money in an S&P 500 Tracker and then buy the same wines on the open market today.

In any case, tastes are changing. Younger drinkers may prefer the juiciness, zest and perfume of young wine and the exciting if sometimes bizarre flavour chromatics of natural wine to the genteel, mushroomy refinement of older ones.

They may prefer smoother red wines in youth to the frank textural challenge of the structured red; they may prefer fresh lightness to heady warmth; they may prefer chillable reds to those whose flavours make most sense at room temperature. They may want wine to drink with plant-based foods, too, rather than feeling they must chomp dutifully through the grilled lamb cutlets scripted by Bordeaux.

They want labels to reveal grape varieties, to outline styles, to convey flavour profiles. They want fun, creativity and fantasy rather than tight-lipped aesthetic orthodoxy. If they want all (or even some) of this, Bordeaux has little to offer.

The great divide

Bordeaux, as we all know, is two worlds. It has a lustrous little head, beautifully coiffed, pomaded and perfumed; and it has a giant, shapeless body dressed in rags from the waist down. The head is Bordeaux’s top 150 châteaux, most of whom now routinely sell their wine at £100 a bottle or more; the body is Bordeaux’s other 5,850 properties.

The head is too expensive, too exclusive, hoarded by investors yet nowadays resented by them, too; the body offers drinkers a mass of undifferentiated and homogenous ‘château’ names. Within that bodily mass, you can find some of the best red-wine value in the world – as well as much boring wine and some bad wine.

How to pick out the pearls? This is a confoundingly complex process. Few merchants bother to roll up their sleeves and help; critics bunch non-luxury Bordeaux into 86-89 points; official ‘cru’ classifications only add to the confusion.

There’s a yawning crevasse, in other words, that separates the two halves of this great Bordeaux divide: over-expensive, under-friendly wine sitting on one side, and cheaper but under- differentiated wine sitting on the other. That crevasse swallows up many of the new drinkers Bordeaux so badly needs.

Light in the gloom

The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way. Here are five suggestions as to how Bordeaux might change for the better. A number of these trends, encouragingly, have already been adopted by some producers.

Adieu ‘Château’

The words ‘Domaine’ and ‘Clos’ have long been used by a small minority of Bordeaux properties for their (top-level) first wines, and it’s now common for subsidiary wines from large properties to be given names that make no reference to ‘Château’ (first growth Lafite has Carruades and Anseillan, for example, while second growth Pichon Baron has Les Griffons and Les Tourelles – see image below).

Why not the first wine, too? That’s what Château Tronquoy- Lalande has just done: it’s now plain Tronquoy. ‘Château’ – literally ‘castle’ – has a legal meaning in Bordeaux (it must describe PDO wine from a property with a chai [cellar] and be produced on that property), but few consumers are aware of this or look for ‘Château’ for that reason.

There’s more to be gained from adopting a new, creative approach to presenting a property to consumers – without the grandiose, formal overtones.

Find a different bottle

There’s no requirement for producers to use a classic Bordeaux bottle (known as a Bordelaise or Frontignan shape); indeed there’s every reason not to, since the shape itself suggests austerity, structure and often the use of oak.

A slope-shouldered bottle immediately creates an air of intriguing ambiguity and originality for any Bordeaux wine – since bottles of this sort tend to be used in wine zones such as Burgundy and the Loire, where the primary emphasis is on limpidity, nuance and terroir.

It’s remarkable how powerful the effect of the change of this visual cue can be.

Tell your story

Wherever you can. Start with the back label, then put an explanatory brochure into each case of your wine; above all, tell your human story in your publicity and on your website.

We human beings like character, story, intrigue. On the website, supplement this with copious technical insights, hiding nothing: wine enthusiasts want truth and technical detail.

No one lusts after pomp and pretension.

Make some new wines

It’s dawning on many Bordeaux producers that the chance to make a white wine in formerly ‘red only’ areas (like most of Bordeaux’s key appellations) is an excellent opportunity for a creative reset with drinkers – but why stop there?

Make a couple of creative Vin de France reds, too.

Have fun, play about, give your children a few tanks in the chai… and change your staid image in the process.

Pack the suitcase

This isn’t an option for all, of course, but many of Bordeaux’s top performers now have significant property holdings in other regions. A Napa Valley property is almost de rigueur. AXA, LVMH, Artemis, the Roederer group and Lafite are all multi-region.

It’s surely no accident that the Bouygues family (Eutopia Estates), the owners of one of the best-performing Médoc properties at present (Montrose), has invested in the Loire, Burgundy, Cognac and the US state of Virginia.

Travel broadens the winemaking mind.

Related articles

• Château d’Issan to make white wine from Rhône grapes
• The transformation of Bordeaux’s crus bourgeois
• A new dawn beckons for the Médoc’s white wines