English Wine

Yes I know this is more my thing, but there is a land thing in here, so read on:-

"Champagne sales are going to decline here, and English sparkling wine will eventually take half of champagne’s share.” So predicts Ian Kellett, once managing director at the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Benson and now owner of Hambledon Vineyard in Hampshire. He’s convinced that England’s advantage is its lower land costs (Champagne’s are €0.9m to €2.1m a hectare). And he maintains there is no shortage of suitable land in England — “if the farmers will sell it”. He also expects champagne prices to continue to rise along with the debt burden of maturing their stock.

The thing is that the only reason Champagne's land prices are so high is because of demand for the land. You'd think a former banker would get this.

A little background to those not in the know:

To call your wine Champagne, it has to follow the rules of the Appelation d'origine contrôlée of Champagne. That includes a list of rules, like what grape varieties you can use, but more importantly for this, it also defines the geographic area. And that is a rather artificial area. Some land inside of it really isn't much good, some land outside would be better. You can grow a damn' good sparkling wine just outside using the same processes and grapes but you can't call it Champagne.

So as Champagne attracts a premium just on its name (a combination of ignorance and it being a Veblen good), what do we think the effect of that is on land prices inside the Champagne area? Yeah. Also worth noting: there's a similar battle to developers and Homeys with this: people with land just outside want the region expanded, people who own land in the region don't.

See, this guy has it wrong. England's advantage isn't having cheaper lands, it's having lower demand for the product. The land is only more expensive because of higher demand. If more people switch to English wine, the price of Champagne will fall, and with it, the value of the land it's grown on. It's still probably more suitable land for growing sparkling wine on.

The rest of the article is quite interesting if you're into general wine stuff. It seems quite a lot of producers are hobby businesses - people who've made money doing something else and are now pumping money into them. And it's still precarious from a climate perspective. Personally, I've not found one I like yet, but some people do like them.

This is News?

From the Telegraph

Scotland's first home-grown wine has been described as “undrinkable” by experts.
Christopher Trotter, from Aberdeen, set up his own vineyard in Fife three years ago in a bid to defy the wet Scottish climate.
The chef and food writer installed 200 vines at his home near Upper Largo and the first bottle of Chateau Largo was eagerly awaited by experts.
But he admitted his first vintage tasted "horrible" as he had failed to chill the grapes quickly enough, which allowed oxidisation to occur.
“It’s not great,” he said. “We have produced a vintage of, shall we say, a certain quality, but I’m confident the next will be much better.
“We have proved we can grow grapes in the Scottish climate.”

Well, yes, you can grow grapes, I'm sure. My father manages to grow a vine in the midlands. The problem is that wine relies on grapes maturing, producing sugars, and one of the factors in that is photosynthesis, which means getting sunlight. It's why Champagne is grown where it is - it's not a particularly sweet wine, because it doesn't get the sort of sun that you get down in Burgundy or the Rhone.

"Climate change studies have suggested that areas like Scotland will become more like the Loire Valley in 20 to 30 years," he told the Scottish Daily Mail.

Uh, no. Even with the worst IPCC band, it's 100+ years. If you're betting on climate change making your wine good, think again.

'If you look back to the English wine-making industry 30 years ago, it was the laughing stock of the wine-drinking world. It was not very nice stuff. But they persevered and now they are making some of finest wines in the world.
"Nyetimber (in southern England) now make sparkling wines every bit as good as a £50 bottle of Champagne.

Most of it still isn't very nice stuff. And certainly isn't good value. I've drank some of it. I'd much rather spend the same money on German wine. The main problem is that it just doesn't get enough fruit, so it's pretty thin. I even drank some £30/bottle Nyetimber to see what the fuss was about and was pretty underwhelmed. I'm not even sure it's as good as £30/bottle champagne, let alone what I can get elsewhere.

Wine Taxes

From Jancis Robinson

Have you noticed the quality of supermarket wine declining?  Have you noticed prices of mass-market wine in the UK rising over the last few years?

The explanation lies in the mealy-mouthed declaration of the Chancellor of the Exchequer each Budget day when he announces, usually in a rather self-satisfied way, that for taxes/duties on alcohol there will be 'no change'. What he means is not that there will be no change to duty rates but that there will be no changes to the measures for a duty escalator brought in in 2008 whereby wine duty rises automatically by inflation plus 2%. So, every year, duties on wines and spirits rise inexorably, by 50% since 2008, as set out years ago.

Sneaky bastards. And most of the media haven't picked up on it.

Opening Wine without a corkscrew

I've not seen this technique before, but apparently it works because of the pressure hits the wine, that hits the air and the air pushes the cork out. Rather neat I think, and not likely to cause damage.

Just to note: people have done tests on corks vs alternative stoppers and broadly speaking, for young drinking wines screwcaps are just as good as corks, don't need a corkscrew and don't have the problem of cork taint that natural corks can get. The writer Jancis Robinson has a comprehensive article about the ups and downs, if anyone's interested.

Wine Shortages

There's a few reports talking about wine shortages, such as this one at the BBC:-

The world is facing a wine shortage, with global consumer demand already significantly outstripping supply, a report has warned.

The research by America's Morgan Stanley financial services firm says demand for wine "exceeded supply by 300m cases in 2012".

...

They say this could be partly explained by "plummeting production" in Europe due to "ongoing vine pull and poor weather".

Well, 2012 was about poor weather, yes. Wine writers aren't too keen on what they've tried of Bordeaux 2012s, where 2010 is considered to be very good indeed.

I'm sure someone is going to start screaming about climate change, even though it seems to have produced some great years, but the point that should be underlined in that article is "vine pull", which Wikipedia explains as:-

Vine pull schemes are programs whereby grape growers receive a financial incentive to pull up their grape vines, a process known as arrachage in French.

in other words, set-aside for wine.

So, there isn't really a crisis in production, more that there's a one-off adjustment to remove subsidised, low-grade wine grapes and have wine grapes sold at market rates. Which is why European production is in decline and New World production is growing. The labour and land costs of someone in Chile are lower than in France.