Word: bordeaux
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...setting as Alfred Tesseron finishes his tour of the Château Pontet-Canet, which is perched on a hill above the legendary Bordeaux wine village of Pauillac. He has talked proudly about how his father bought the château 30 years ago. He has driven his electric cart along the neat rows of vines and pointed out some of his big recent investments: the state-of-the-art water recycling[an error occurred while processing this directive] system, the new storage and bottling barn and the twin rows of conical fermentation vats. Now comes the moment of truth...
...attractive to consumers; and the end of all distillation subsidies. None of that went down well in France. "The proposals in their current state are unacceptable," growls Denis Verdier, head of the cooperative producers' association, whose members make one out of every two bottles of French wine. But in Bordeaux - and this is a sign of the times - a surprising number of people think the European Commission proposals make sense. Roland Feredj, director general of the Bordeaux Interprofessional Wine Council (CIVB), takes issue with some of the details, but says that, overall, the E.U. proposals are "interesting." He explains...
...pain caused by the glut is less acute in France than in Australia. But it also helps to explain why the French lost out so badly in export markets in the first place: their producers are bound by a plethora of strict rules. Unlike their Australian rivals, Bordeaux winemakers aren't free to grow as many grapes or make as much wine as they want; quantities are strictly limited. Moreover, they can't sell their wine as Merlot, or any other single grape variety - one of the most popular New World innovations. And under a regulation passed in the early...
Indeed, one of the big concerns around Bordeaux is less about how to move aggressively into a bright new future and more about how to avoid a damaging fragmentation between those who are doing well and those who aren't. "It's almost like a Latin American economy, some very rich and some very poor. This could cause a revolution," worries Pierre Lurton, who runs two of the most exclusive properties, Château Cheval Blanc in the St. Emilion region and Château d'Yquem, the world-famous sweet white Sauternes. Back at Château Pontet-Canet, Tesseron sits down...
...speaks Chinese. "Yes, there are new clients, but the real business still comes from our old ones," he says. "I'm sure in the next 20 to 30 years, people will be interested in products that are top. And I'm doing all I can to be top." In Bordeaux these days, that's a mantra for survival...