Bordeaux plans for the future - CIVB's view

Georges Haushalter, the president of the CIVB (Conseil Interprofessionel du Vin de Bordeaux) was in Paris recently to talk about the new vintage 2010 and also in general about Bordeaux’s plans for the future.

Bordeaux has more or less recovered from the crises of 2008/2009 when they lost about 20 % of their sales. But the crisis is not totally gone. Some chateaux still have problems, especially many petit chateaux – small, unknown chateaux in (mainly) AOC Bordeaux – and some of these will probably soon disappear from the scene. One of CIVB’s priorities is to reorganise the sales in bulk to be able to more effectively fight against low prices that harms the image of Bordeaux and, of course, harms the financial situation of the winegrowers. The beautiful vintage 2010 will help to us to take one further step out of the crises, says Georges Haushalter.

Bordeaux is a wine region with enormous differences in prices. You have everything from very simple wines that nobody wants to pay for; to the extremely expensive ones that are more like luxury products comparable with a Louis Vuitton handbag. If you have wines that nobody wants to pay for, well, then something has to be done. The only way to fight against low, image harming prices, however, is to make the wines more attractive, in taste and in presentation. If you can’t do that, stop making the wines.

Georges Haushalter also wishes to make Bordeaux more accessible, to make people understand that they don’t have to be afraid of Bordeaux. This is probably a very wise way of thinking. Too many people think of Bordeaux as a region with high prices and prestigious chateaux and nothing more. It is important to make people realize that Bordeaux has so much more to offer, in very reasonable prices. In Great Britain a marketing campaign is running at the moment, with the slogan "With good food we drink Bordeaux”. More campaigns to stress the fact that Bordeaux is the food wine par excellence (so true) is being planned.

Georges Haushalter also wants to make Bordeaux easier to understand. ”We have many different appellations”, he says, ”around 50, and that is our richness and strength and we don’t want to change that, but we need to make it more easy to understand.”

Easier said than done, but then that goes for the whole of France.