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French wine glut heading to distillery Sender: Ian Salut-Hi Bill Loftin, le-on Thu, 27 Jan 2005 20:35:03 GMT, tu disais-you said:- Well Bill, the thing is that there are limits to the extent to which prices can be cut. I'm not defending these unsold AOCs, they're mainly rubbish wines anyway, and distilling them is as good a use of them as anything. The same could be said of 80% of italian wines, 80% of US wines and so on. The problem is that the supply of wine has gone rocketting up and the demand hasn't. We've been talking about this trend on the french language wine echo for about 4 years now. As for the price of french wines in the US, I am truly shocked by them. How much would you expect to find a bottom end Bordeaux AOC in a cut price supermarket selling for? I know that the price paid by negociants to the grower is under $3 a litre. You really can't expect a wine maker in France to make a living at that price, especially when they can't expand their production to make economies of scale. At the top end, the wines we write about here all sell out, and there's virtually no problem for them. Don't imagine that AOC means "good", it doesn't. It means "guaranteed provenance". So an AOC Bordeaux is guaranteed to be made in the Bordeaux region, from the right grapes and with a fairly strictly controlled set of conditions. None of that guarantees that it will be any better than the equivalent loose guarantee would imply in say California. So I'm neither surprised nor shocked that these wines remain unsold. They're no good. -- All the Best Ian Hoare mailbox full to avoid spam. try me at website
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