The Guardian view on France’s wine crisis: the answer to claret could be clairet | Editorial
THese are always fearful weeks in the Bordeaux Vineyards where 15% of France has grown, including in careful places and chateaue and chatea and chatea and chatea and chalatee moudchild. In earlier years this ritual fear under the region of the region is a pleasant full-colorable quality. In the middle of august, the grapes would ripen and turn their color. About 45 days from now, tradition dictated, it will be time to start choosing the 2025 Vintage. If the windwriter Edmund Penning-Rowsell Set it: “To choose or choose to choose is the most beautiful decision in Bordeaux.”
This once timeless rhythm now collapses. Part of the problem is the Climate Crisis. Bordeaux still benefits from its moderate Atlantic climate. Southern West France is a lot of hotter and dryer. Even in the Gironde region, maximum temperatures close to 40c at Times, this last week. Adaptation, in the form of harder grapes and larger crop diversity, it feels unavoidable.
However, a much larger challenge is today Change wine memory market. The question of red wind generally, and for the full body, long wims with general high alcohol content that in the byeal iseal with Bordeaux in the Bordeaux. This has affected not only the signature Premiers Crus In which monarchs and the world-old empire invested, but also the vineyard producing the usual Bordeaux-red Wines sold in supermarkets around the world. For a region whose wine output is 85% reads, this is an existential crisis.
Bordeaux Producer about 650m bottles of wind each year; But it sells only 500 million. The question to red wine in France has fallen by 38% in the past five years; In the 10 years to 2023, the fall was 45%. Still the Slump is not limited to France. Question in the Chinese market has half Since 2017. American rates Will not hit for a doubt exports the 20% of Bordeaux export previously over the Atlantic Ocean. These consumption changes will likely be irreversible, at least in the short and medium term.
A popular reply for a lot would be to close prizes. Global Bordearix Prices are outrageous in the Chinese boom years. But with consumers who are expanding in droving, and too much producers who work together at a loss, priced cuts The market not suspended. Using the French government and the EU, about 15% of Bordeaux Vineyrreer, and to new use, including olives and kiwifruit, because 2019 including.
In the nickname of time there is more traditionally, but also really radical idea – to produce lighter and fewer tannic winds. History is on the side of this idea. Bordeaux Reds have been known in Britain as Claret. But this much debated word dates of when the Henry of England ried and his descendant in medieval Aquesine. Back were the reds of Bordeaux often lighter, Fresher Wines known as Clairetsomewhere between a modern red and a rosé, To drink young, that mean for English to mean English after they arrived from their journey from France.
Small quantities of clairet are still produced in parts of the Bordeaux Region. Today, there are moving to extend production with the purpose of winning new consumers who have declined heavier reds. Clairet's lawyers say it's to drunk within a few years being drunk and should be drunk. Traditional Claret Drinkers will come up their decanters in disgust. But Clairet just sounds the thing to accompany a barbecue about a warm summer days.
