Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution FROM THE PUBLISHER
"For wine lovers the world over, Bordeaux is the virtual center of the universe, and for years the traditions of winemaking have remained unchanged there. But in the past two decades, innovators have stormed the bastions, making their mark - and their fortunes - modernizing the production and marketing of wine. Tinkering with established techniques of cultivation and fermentation, this new breed of winemakers is producing richer, fruit-driven wines that can be drunk younger than the more traditional Lafites and Latours." William Echikson introduces us to the players central to the changes sweeping Bordeaux: the noble owners of Chateau d'Yquem engaged in a soap-opera feud; a stonemason turned winemaker whose wine, made in a garage, sells for $100 a bottle; the Maryland-based critic Robert Parker, whose opinion routinely makes or breaks a wine; and the New World operations that have used branding and mass-production techniques to undercut Bordeaux's supremacy. Echikson unravels the mysteries of the legendary 1855 classification - revealing just how it established itself as the Bible of Bordeaux, and how it was at last successfully challenged.
SYNOPSIS
It is perhaps inevitable that Echikson, as a wine columnist for the Wall Street Journal Europe, would see recent events in Bordeaux winemaking as a glorious battle in which upstart winemakers, driven by globalized forces of capitalist competition, wage a successful battle against the heavy-handed regulations of the French state rooted in the famous 1855 classification. And so he does in his narrative of the growing season and harvest of 2001. Along the way he provides a window into the operations of the great and small wine-making houses, profiles of winemakers and powerful critics, and a glimpse into the economics of wine production and marketing. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
..."Noble Rot" is based on the implicit assumption that the reader is familiar with these wines not just as famous old names but also as gustatory pleasures. I felt a bit like the boy pressing his nose against the toy-store window since purchasing most of the wines so lavishly praised by Echikson would require taking out a second mortgage. You, dear reader, may well feel the same, leaving you to share my lament that Echikson did not devote more attention to the lower end of the Bordeaux market.
Still, conflict in the wine business is as amusing and occasionally as instructive to read about as conflict in any other business, and for several decades Bordeaux has had plenty of it....[I]t is always fun to watch the elite squabbling in their sandbox, and that is the chief pleasure provided by "Noble Rot."
Publishers Weekly
In vino veritas. Yet as Echikson (Burgundy Stars) shows in this entertaining journey through Bordeaux's wine-making landscape, the truth of wine is also highly subjective and subject to change. Bordeaux has long epitomized fine wine. In 1662, Echikson relates, the English diarist Samuel Pepys described "a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan that hath a good and most particular taste...." This Haut-Brion was the first Bordeaux wine; it would soon join a handful of other chateaux that became the coveted "first growths." Indeed, Thomas Jefferson noted there were "four vineyards of first quality": Margaux, Latour, Lafite and Haut-Brion. After a rigid classification system was imposed in 1855, it seemed likely that the French reverence for tradition would make "innovative Bordeaux" an oxymoron. Over the last several decades, however, some revolutionary "garagistes" (garage wine makers) have begun using new growing and wine-making techniques to show the world that less than perfect land and less than blue blood can yield extraordinary wines. Echikson, a wine columnist for Wall Street Journal Europe, profiles merchants, brokers, enologists and the most influential wine critic in the world, the American Robert Parker. The title comes from Chateau d' Yquem, the maker of a legendary sauterne ("noble rot" has to do with allowing grapes to begin to rot on the wine to achieve concentration and sweetness). Oenophiles will come away from this lively account with a sense of how globalization and economics have challenged the rot and created ferment and growth in ancient Bordeaux. 23 illus. Agent, Michelle Tessler. (May) Forecast: Bordeaux is the world's wine capital, and few books have covered it as accessibly as Echikson does. The author's connection to WSJ Europe and his status as Brussels bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires will help his book get media coverage. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Wall Street Journal wine columnist Echikson explores the return of quality to Bordeaux over the past 20 years, as well as the economic flat-lining that will put a check on the recovery. Although his satisfying portrait of the Bordeaux wine industry in the late 20th century concentrates on a few producers, brokers, and merchants, it nonetheless provides an overview of what is happening in the region as a whole. What looked like "another painful lesson in globalization, the latest chapter in France's ongoing and mostly losing struggle to balance its artisan traditions with the unyielding demands of the marketplace," produced an interesting twist. A good number of producers decided to cut back on quantity, no longer making "the vine piss wine" and taking a more severe approach to the selection of grapes. This was most evident in the work of the garagistes, whose social battles with the mandarins are chronicled in sprightly fashion by Echikson, as is the whole depressing ballyhoo at Chateau d'Yquem. The author considers Robert Parker's impact on the area-wide move toward a denser wine, which infuriates many of the 10,000 producers who understand the existential mandate of terroir to be the delivery of variety, not homogenization. He brings his background in economics smartly to bear on challenges to bureaucratic regulation, the rise of cooperatives, and the overpricing of bottles (particularly those that get the Parker nod); when the stock market tanked, Echikson notes, so did the Bordeaux bubble. The most original materials here are the close portraits, in broad cross-section, of a few Bordeaux winemakers, including the profoundly artisanal garagiste Michel Gracia, arriviste Yves Vatelot atChateau Lascombes, and Chateau d'Yquem's difficult feudal paternalist, Count Alexandre de Lur-Saluces. Echikson's sleeve across the pedigreed windpipe of undeserving premier crus is a welcome reminder to seek quality, not fancy names. An entertaining introduction to Bordeaux, though little of it is new. (23 illustrations, 1 map)Agent: Michelle Tessler/Carlisle & Co.
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