Bordeaux Greed meets Chinese Affluence

This is a great documentary, for both old and newer hands at wine. The story is about wine and about politics – those of the great chateaux of Bordeaux, and the investors that drive the prices up, and the Chinese who’ve displaced the Americans to become the biggest market for the premier grand crus.

Unlike Mondovino, which is fascinating but wanders off in all kinds of directions, Red Obsession keeps a tight focus on Bordeaux and its big brands:  Petrus, Lafite, Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion and Mouton-Rothschild. The doco is just 80 minutes long and was made by David Roach and Warwick Ross (Young Einstein, Reckless Kelly). Andrew Caillard of Langton’s Auctions (now owned by Woolworths) is the associate producer, and a frequent contributor of insights.

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Yes, it’s out already and James has played it safe by naming Penfolds his winery of the year. No bargains there. In fact, we would’ve given Penfolds the GREED IS GOOD, MORE GREED IS BETTER award.

His top lists include quite a few wines under $25. They’re all 96 points unless it says otherwise:

Knappstein hand-picked Riesling 2012                                                                                

$17 at Winestar, haven’t tried it, gets 94 points from Stelzer and Stock

Petaluma Hanlin Hill Riesling 2012                                                                                         

$23 at Dan M’s, not one of our top Rieslings – squeaky clean as usual

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Winner of Winestate Magazine’s World’s Greatest Shiraz Challenge VIII

5 June 2013

The wine beat over 700 international Shiraz reds from France, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. ‘I couldn’t be prouder of our Filsell Shiraz,’ Grant Burge said as he celebrated the award. ‘We’ve won 5 major trophies, 22 gold medals and 47 silver medals since Filsell’s release in 1992.’

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So big it will poison the auction market for rare Burgundy for years

‘Millions if not tens or hundreds of millions of counterfeit wines are sold every year,’ said energy billionaire William Koch after he won a lawsuit against a consigner who’d sold him counterfeit bottles of old Bordeaux, some of it from Jefferson’s time. ‘The counterfeiters don’t want anyone to know, for $100 they make it and mark it up to $15,000, I myself paid $100,000 for a counterfeit wine. To me the whole industry is corrupt.’

Wine scandals are pretty common, perhaps because wine is such a fickle commodity. Even experts and experienced people in the trade are often taken in, which brings us back to one of my favourite topics: the difficulty of judging wine. The older the wines are, the more difficult they are to judge.

The usual kind of wine scam involves passing off cheap wine as something better and getting more money for it. That’s what happened from 2006 to 2008 in the USA, after the movie Sideways had ridiculed Merlot and Americans turned to Pinot Noir. E & J Gallo was found to be selling an $8 French Pinot Noir under its Red Bicyclette label that was mostly made from Merlot and Syrah – some 18 million bottles of it, worth nearly $5.5 million.

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For once, the lazy way is the best way

The Online Option

A good friend wrote in and asked why I didn’t mention BWS as a wine retailer. He and his partner buy most of their wine there for reasons of convenience: the BWS is right next to the Woolworths supermarket they buy their groceries from.

The answer is terribly simple: You won’t find good deals at BWS unless they have a 30% off sale on. I told my friend that I do most of my shopping online, and that the BWS website is not searchable and thus not of much use. He wrote back saying ‘neither of us has ever considered the possibility of having wine delivered.’

I suspect there are many other wine lovers out there who haven’t. Instead, they join the big crush in the grog shops before Christmas, Easter, Anzac Day, Mother’s and Father’s Day, Australia Day. Parking is a hassle, so is shopping in the crowded aisles, getting through the checkout queues, schlepping all the grog to the car and unloading it at home and schlepping it up or down to your place.

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Decanter tells us that judges at this year’s Decanter World Wine Awards ‘tasted a record-breaking 14,362 wines and awarded nearly 10,000 medals … This year, 219 wine experts from 27 countries, including 75 Masters of Wine and 13 Master Sommeliers, gathered in London in April to taste 14,362 wine entries from around the world …

What is fascinating, and proof of the ridiculous waste of time these events are, is the number of medals awarded: ‘A total of 9,873 wines were awarded a Decanter medal: 156 Regional Trophies, 229 Gold medals, 1,665 Silver medals, 4,165 Bronze medals, and 3,658 Commendeds.’

That means 2 out of 3 wines at this Galah Event scored a medal of some sort. I rest my case.

Kim