02 March 2017
En Primeur
Wines for the future?
By Chin Chin
If the state of London high streets is anything to go by, estate agency is a very overcrowded profession. What happens, then, when the profession reaches saturation point? When, whether due to declining markets or computerisation, there are just not enough jobs to go round? What happens to those born with a natural propensity to optimism and exaggeration if they cannot get into real estate? What can they do instead? Their ebullient personalities make them difficult employees for the state sector, where a level of grumpiness is de rigueur. Success in big business tends to be based on realism rather than optimism. The travel industry? No, there the over-optimistic get no repeat business because their clients are languishing in the jails of foreign dictators. Politics? The recent trend is for electorates to be hard on those who promise but do not deliver. What they need is a profession where you can exaggerate like mad and never get found out. What about the profession of wine merchant?
Those who give away their details freely, will now find their inboxes filling up with offers to buy cases of wine en primeur. That means that you buy the wine before it is bottled or shipped to the UK, and for the time being free of any due or VAT, so that it feels pleasantly cheap. Of course you will pay the taxes when you take delivery of the bottles a year or two hence, but by then you have forgotten about paying for the wine in the first place so that it will seem cheap all over again. Two bargains for the price of one!
That isn’t the only selling point, however. To be complete, an en primeur offer will not just describe the wine as “succulent”, “flinty”, “delicious” or, like a bungalow in a depressed area, as having “great potential”, it will also describe the makers, let us say Jean and Claudette. They are inevitably from an old wine family whose recent run of excellent vintages has yet to be recognised by the market. The offer lets you in on the details of their charming provincial life. They are just your type, expert without being arrogant. Quite apart from talking about them, however, the offer also says something about you. It is marketed to those who have the discernment and foresight to appreciate it. To reject it and buy your wine from the supermarket like everybody else would be so… ordinary. It would be like turning away friends, and you would lose a marvelous commercial opportunity to boot.
In the small print, however, there is a second message. Buying en primeur, like all great adventures for the more sophisticated, carries risk. The wine may not turn out to be as succulent, flinty, or delicious as you expected. That of course will be mainly your fault. The literature points out that the decision as to when to open a wine is one of personal taste and, if you opened it at the wrong moment, what did you expect? Had you stored it better, opened it at a better time or warmed your glass more carefully (oh dear, you didn’t drink it during the full moon, did you?) it would surely have lived up to its potential. The best wines are for top people to drink and, if you don’t make the grade, I am afraid that you are not going to enjoy them.
You can see how well this works from the wine merchant’s point of view. If the wine is better than you thought, they take the credit. If it turns out to be a “pleasant little paraffin” then you only paid a paraffin price. If it is rubbish, however, it is your fault and if you bought by the case (how very middle class to buy in any other way) you have another 11 bottles to try opening in slightly different circumstances until, if ever, you get it right.
Still, buying something unpleasant is not the greatest risk of the en primeur offer. The real danger for most of us is in buying wine in advance at all. Those with great cellars operate them as a business, selling wines as they reach maturity and buying them en primeur while they are still cheap. If the cellar is big enough, this more than pays for its maintenance, leaving the owner with an income or, at least, the pleasure of drinking the surplus. But for that to work, most of the really good wine has to be sold rather than enjoyed. Those of us with more modest cellars have something in common with this technique. We don’t drink the great wines either. The difference is that instead of selling them we throw them down the sink.
Let us suppose that you go on holiday in France, and that on the way back you come through the Burgundy where you buy, at great expense, six bottles of really good red wine. When you get back you put them in the wine rack marked with special labels “do not touch, special occasion”. Having once been told by my then teenage daughter that I shouldn’t worry about the bottle she had borrowed for a party as she had carefully avoided taking one of my new ones, I am a great one for warning labels. So there the bottles sit and each time you go to the cellar you stroke them, thinking how impressed your friends will be and what a reputation you will create as a bon viveur. Now you only need the special occasion.
The trouble is that, like trains on the southern region, really special occasions are a rarity. Along comes your birthday. No, you can’t use the wine for that because it is a big party which would mean drinking all six bottles in one go. Then there is dinner with the boss. If you produce a bottle of that wine for him, he will think that you are being paid too much. What about those people from Hampstead? They are quite up themselves enough as it is without thinking that you produce your best wine merely because they deign to cross your Islington threshold. Guests of all sorts come and go, sometimes too many, sometimes too undiscriminating, sometimes people who never ask you back, sometimes too pleased with themselves; the bottles remain in the rack. And one sad day you are boasting a little to a friend about the treasures in your cellar when he says “The ’02? Dear me, it should have been drunk long ago. It will be vinegar now.”
Well, that is expensive wines off the buying list. What about something safe and solid, a Crozes Hermitage from the Rhone, for example? You won’t go wrong there, drinkable, not too expensive and lighter than the heavy blackcurranty wines of Chateauneuf. Surely that would be OK? Well, yes it would, but didn’t you say you were driving through France on your holiday? How much more fun to buy your wine on the way back…
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