For around twenty years, a little pernicious music has vilified, caricatured and undermined Bordeaux wines. We even invented a word for this phenomenon: “Bordeaux bashing”. As with the fashion for white sneakers, the average person has been converted, without even questioning it. Caricatures are unfair in the sense that they freeze an image that is not reality. Since the Claret favored by the English in the Middle Ages, Bordeaux has changed. Vintage after vintage, that’s saying something. The statutory burgundy carries beautiful children behind it. Bordeaux is being converted (first organic vineyard), becoming a pirate, changing colors, becoming refreshed, adorned with bubbles…
In defense
The violent crisis experienced by Bordeaux – a prize-winning grubbing campaign of 10,000 hectares –, the massive deconsumption of red wine, the difficulties in exporting do not help to restore the image of the vineyard. Vineyards. Because Bordeaux has 65 different appellations and as many ways of handling and transforming the fruit of the vine as there are winegrowers. There are a little more than 5,000 in Gironde.
“Bordeaux bashing” gives bees to an entire industry and makes three Bordeaux wine lawyers see red, who deliver their pleadings to put things right in a book: “In defense of Bordeaux wines” (editions Le Looking for Midi). Three “non-Bordeaux”, which doesn’t spoil anything: the writer and editor Jean Le Gall, the reporter Jean-Luc Schilling, who in 2018 signed an “Immoderate praise of Bordeaux wine” (Editions Philippe Rey), and the journalist and writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann. An “urbi et orbi” manifesto to “recall the possible greatness of wine, far from the lies which abound and offend the name of Bordeaux as well as its history”, insists Jean-Luc Schilling.
Exasperation
“This book was born from exasperation, that of hearing the same caricatured litanies about Bordeaux wines. They faced an unprecedented smear campaign. Bordeaux found itself at the forefront of a clean slate movement which targeted the Old World. Being interested in the campaign against Bordeaux is being interested in the world as it is going,” explains Jean Le Gall.
“Bordeaux wines have faced an unprecedented smear campaign”
Which raises a question: why did this curse fall on Bordeaux? “First, there are the symbols, the castles, the suspicion of being heirs, easy fortunes… There is a game of social classes. Afterwards, if we go into the detail of what Bordeaux means once we have it in the mouth, we realize that it is a complexity, a sophistication. This turned out to be the enemy of modernity. Modernity is simplicity, lightness, it is fruit and nothing but fruit. This human know-how came as a contradiction to modernity. »
Cancel culture
For the authors, the starting point of the “bashing” comes from the film “Mondovino” by Jonathan Nossiter. With these Bordeaux residents in white coats or depicted in aristocratic trappings. When winegrowers from other regions are represented with their feet in the ground at the bedside of their vineyard. A devastating editing effect. “What followed was a campaign of cultivated disinformation, Bordeaux found itself on the front line of a cancel culture, of anger against classicism,” adds Jean Le Gall.
To the point that Bordeaux has been banned from trendy restaurants and urban wine merchants for whom natural, fruity or alcohol-free wines are a new Holy Trinity. Jean-Paul Kauffman writes: “The bashing was inevitable, because the time had come to dethrone King Bordeaux. » We can see, in this campaign of denigration, the echo of a regicidal impulse which has haunted the country since the Revolution. “1789 is the desire for dethronement. Indeed, Bordeaux is in a position of cultural hegemony which is contested. The problem is that 1793 is no longer dethroning but erasure,” notes Jean Le Gall.
In this three-handed plea, it is not a question of an oenological subject, but of observing the logic at work. “The product is not in question, it has never been so good,” notes Jean-Luc Schilling. It's about putting things back where they should be: Bordeaux is the largest wine region for quality wine. Wines of harmony, well balanced, which do not bring it back, which have tact. During its thousand-year history, Bordeaux has seen others. It’s going to come back.” What if it was in 2025?
“In defense of Bordeaux wines” by Jean-Luc Schilling, Jean Le Gall, Jean-Paul Kauffmann, ed. Le Cherche Midi, 312 p., €21.90, ebook, €14.99.
