Wine History Repeats Itself

Posted 01/10/2008 at 10:00 AM by Ben

Clos LaChance Winery (http://www.closlachance.com), of San Martin, California, has bought a mobile bottling line that will travel to small wineries and bottle their wine for them. They say it will allow small, family-owned wineries that can't afford their own expensive bottling operations to call their wines "estate bottled," which many consumers look for as a sign of quality.

This is a clear case of history repeating itself. Bordeaux was in the same situation as late as the 1950s, when even many prestigious wines were not chateau bottled, which created some real problems of authenticity if not downright adulteration for some very pricey wines. ChateauPetrus, for example, which is a shockingly small estate considering its fame, used to send most of its wine off off to the JP Moueix cellars in Libourne for bottling, and also shipped some of it in barrel to be bottled in London. That's why you'll may see older vintages of ChateauPetrus listed as "Army Navy Club Bottling" or "Corney & Barrow bottling" in auction catalogs.

While many of these non-chateau bottlings were handled strictly on the up and up (including Petrus, for the most part), it could not fail to be noticed by certain unscrupulous operators that the opportunities for profitable mischief were many and varied. The results were predictable. Some very dubious stuff appeared under prestigious labels, and wine lovers were being ripped off left and right.

The man who solved the problem for Bordeaux was the American Russian immigrant Alexis Lichine, who was running a successful wine export business from Bordeaux while writing his famous wine encyclopedia. Lichine came up with the idea of mounting a miniature bottling line on the back of a flatbed truck and hauling it to  the small properties to bottle the vintage. Since French law only required but the bottling be done  within the boundaries of the vineyards to qualify as "chateau bottled," this nicely solved the problem of providing authenticity at an affordable price for Bordeaux's many small wineries.

Lichine, it should be noted, made a large fortune serving the bottling needs of smaller chateau, enough in fact to purchase a very  prominent Margaux classified growths for himself called La Prieuré, which he promptly named ChateauPrieuré-Lichine. Of course, all the wine in his property was chateau bottled.

Today, most of the small Bordeaux chateaux have prospered sufficiently to afford their own bottling lines, which is why the mysterious words "mise en bouteille au chateau" ("put in bottle at château") appear on  most Bordeaux labels nowadays. Occasionally, however, you'll still see a ChateauX or ChateauY labeled  "mise en bouteille par le proprietaire" or "mise en bouteille dans nos chais" ("in our cellar").  Though the words sound nice, they signify absolutely nothing. Approach these non-chateau bottled wines with due caution.

E-Mail | Digg this! | del.icio.us
The No Spit Zone RSS | Comments RSS for this post