Where Wine Is More Mentally Challenging Than Wall Street

For five midsummer days every other year, Bordeaux plays host to the Vinexpo, the worlds biggest and most influential wine trade fair. About 45,000 visitors are estimated to have attended this years event, which ended on Friday last. Its the wine worlds equivalent of the Cannes Film Festival, said Jacques Lurton, a Bordeauxbased winemaker.

France has long ceased to have a monopoly on worldclass wines. Each Vinexpo attracts increasingly confident newcomers, and non-French producers now account for 37 per cent of the floorspace.

As many as 35 countries were showing their wines, including Algeria, Lebanon, Macedonia, Morocco, Moldova, Slovenia, Tunisia and Ukraine.

 

The greatest of the great Bordeaux, French chateauz, however, do not have stands at Vinexpo. Instead, they open their gates for lavish, exclusive parties for clients and contacts during the event.

I come because the wine world is evolving so fast that I want to have a sense of whats happening elsewhere, said winemaker Zelma Longs, executive vice-president of Moet Hennessy California Wineries. If I could find the same content somewhere else, I would go there, she added.

But many also come for the spectacular celebration of wine that the Bordeaux setting provides.

You spend the week on a high, window-shopping the wines of the world, said Alain Georger, psychiatrist-turned-bubbly maker at Maison Parigot et Richard in Savigny les Beaune, in Burgundy. He comes to meet his customers, and to taste wines unavailable at home.

Many also attend the London Wine Trade Fairs each May at Olympia, which attracts high-class exhibitors cultivating the open UK market, but it is a modest, compact, non-frills affairs compared with Vinexpo.

Last weeks jamboree was an opportunity to network and trade information as well as wine. This is the first Vinexpo since consumers in northern Europe and Pacific Rim countries shunned Frech wines in response to President Jacques Chiracs programme of nuclear tests in the Pacific.

At the start of the week, exhibitors at the Australian stand snapped Alain Juppe, the former French prime minister, trying a glass of their wine. Elsewhere, the talk is of a phylloxera outbreak in Chile. The country had until now been spared the ravages of a pest that has devastated most other plantings at one time or another. California too, is suffering phylloxera and cannot produce enough wine to satisfy customers. Faithfuls, including US buyers, are looking elsewhere for suppliers.

South Africa is still enjoying something of a honeymoon since the end of apartheid and is finding it easy to sell everything it makes. That worries some. Sell early, sell often, seems to be the motto in some wineries. Buyers who have been gazumped out of purchases are not happy.

The vast vineyards of east and central Europe, thought to have huge potential when the region opened up after the cold war, are failing to deliver. The potential may still be there, but prospective investors have been strangled by red tape. They have turned their attention to countries where the atmosphere is more friendly to entrepreneurs.

Hungary, with its great sweet Tokay wines, is one of the few places where they still feel the struggle is worth the trouble, given opportunities elsewhere.

I never get bored with wine, said a New York importer searching for midprice Bordeaux reds to fill a gap left by shortages in California. He recently re-entered the business after a time on Wall Street. Wines more intellectually challenging than Wall Street, he says, and its more fun.