Bordeaux - Too Good a Season?

Filed in archive French Wines on September 21, 2006

Is Bordeaux ever going to get a break or what? Now things are going too well for wine growers over there. Yup, that's right.

With wonderful weather came wonderful tasting grapes and wonderful tasting wine, but they have a glut of it now so that means lots of great wine and lower than expected prices for wine makers.

More from The Observer:

It is the ultimate irony. For the wine growers of Bordeaux, already suffering a financial crisis, the season has been too good. Though the quality appears to offer hope of salvation, the quantity of the 2006 vintage is causing problems.

This week the great wine fairs of France will open their doors and instead of being saved by huge profits on what experts say may be a vintage to rival that of last year - said to be the best for a century - winegrowers are likely to see prices collapse even further. 'Whatever we seem to do we get it in the neck,' said Mathieu Barbier, a Bordeaux-based winegrower. 'All the climatic conditions have been perfect and the grapes are magnificent... but the harvest is so large that prices are just going to dive again.'