Winter officially begins on 22 December for New Yorkers, but the state found itself under an unseasonable blanket of white fluffy stuff in mid-October 2015. As car windscreens were scraped and commuters tottered around cautiously on the snowy streets, things were heating up inside the auction room at Sotheby’s, as paddles bobbed up and down like boats on a rough sea, bidding on wines sourced directly from Bordeaux First Growth Château Margaux.
As the gavel fell with a loud bang on the final lot of the day, calculators tapped furiously to tally up the final sum. The numbers team would have been forgiven for double-checking the maths: the figure read $2.8m, nearly double the high estimate. So much for Bordeaux being in the doldrums.
Provenance always pays
The story is repeated elsewhere; direct-from-the-cellar sales attract a significant premium whether it’s Lafite or Latour, Joseph Drouhin or Bouchard Père et Fils. “There’s always been a focus on provenance, and people are getting more interested in where their wine comes from,” explains Charles Antin, auctioneer and senior international wine specialist for Zachys Wine Auctions. “There has always been a premium on it, but the premiums are a lot higher now. People are a lot more aggressive – you see it when you re-offer storied collections.”
In recent years, however, the use of the phrase ‘perfect provenance’ has been prolific. Although it has been hailed as a ‘new trend’ in fine wine, proof of perfect storage over a wine’s life has long been the preferred option of serious collectors.
A classic example of direct-from-the-cellar sourcing comes from Thomas Jefferson. Following his well-documented travels through France, he started ordering wine directly from his favourite estates rather than through an agent, having become sceptical of the integrity of the wines they were supplying. In a letter to the owner of Château Lafite [Rothschild] he asked: “If it would be possible to have them bottled and packed at your estate, it would doubtless be a guarantee that the wine was genuine.”
In 1415, centuries before Jefferson was born, Bordeaux’s innkeepers were “summoned to the town hall to be told that if there were any more cases of the passing-off of other wines as those of Bordeaux, the offenders would be put in the pillory and banished from the town.” Going even further back, Edward III decreed in 1327 that, “Every customer had the right to see his wine being drawn from the cask and it was forbidden to put a curtain over the doorway to the cellar, so that all might have a clear view.” Transparency, whether it’s receipts from the original collector, wines sourced direct from a château’s cellar, or drawing your curtains, has long been recognised as fundamental to protect the consumer.
Accept no substitutes
Yet, nearly 600 years after Edward III was telling pub landlords that they needed to stop duping their customers, the French wine industry was rife with dodgy dealers. Until the creation of the appellation contrôlée system in the mid-1930s, it was common for wines from Bordeaux and Champagne, for example, to be bolstered or wholly produced from cheaper grapes from the Midi or even Algeria. It was a source of contention for French grape growers in the early 20th Century. It is estimated a quarter of a million protestors turned out in Carcassonne in 1907 to protest against the importation of raisins, which were used to make wine, depressing grape prices.
During the so-called ‘Champagne riots’ of 1911, vignerons marched through the streets shouting “Down with fraud” in response to the growing quantities of Champagne that was produced from grapes grown in the Loire and Midi, brought in by rail, and then made sparkling in the cellars of Épernay and Reims. It left the cellars of unscrupulous merchants as Champagne, and serviced the growing thirst for France’s finest fizz. Following the unrest, wine producers in the region had to declare whether their wine was true Champagne or merely sparkling wine. The resulting figures from before WWI suggest that as much as 50% of the French market’s “Champagne” consumption between 1890 and 1910 could have been Champagne made from outside wines. The Champagne crusade continues to do this day, trying to stamp out the use of the region’s name by overseas sparkling winemakers.
Wine skulduggery has been around since grapes were first stomped and fermented. The Rudy Kurniawan film Sour Grapes is a reminder that there are less than scrupulous individuals keen to make a quick buck. The question of wine provenance, it turns out, is as old as wine itself.
