July 2021
Bonjour!
I hope you have been keeping well through these bizarre times. I’ve been thinking that it must be (high!) time to send out some brief news about life in the wine business in the historic town of Ardres, together with a Summer Offer!
Clearly as travel is freeing up and as more of you are now coming to our doors, one can see that many of you are heading off towards your holiday homes - for where you may well need a variety of decent wines during your stay. If it makes it easier for you, we are happy to deliver there around your arrival date and above 12 bottles, maximum two day delivery is free of charge within France.
Our Summer Offer
As summer is apparently on the way, we have pleasure in offering you 10% off any of our 10 rosés - whether still or sparkling until the end of August. You can see fuller notes on each wine on www.boursot.co.uk/buy.html where of course you can also place your order.
You may know some of these wines already – they are all great but for the finest quality but still at a sensible price, the Château de Pourcieux, Côtes de Provence is back with its 2020 vintage and in sparkling, if you’d like something light, fresh, gently fruity yet dry, you should try the Crémant de Bordeaux from Château de Fontenille which, once tasted, is a wine that people come back for - time and time again.
10% OFF ALL ROSE WINES
| Le Petit Pont, Réserve, Rosé, Vin de Pays d’Oc, 2020 | 4,60€ | 4,14€ | £3.50 |
| Le Syrah Rosé de Morin-Langaran (Languedoc), 2019 | 6,90€ | 6,21€ | £5.30 |
| Cabernet d’Anjou, Cuvée du Rossignol, Château la Varière (Loire), 2018 | 7,50€ | 6,75€ | £5.80 |
| Lirac Rosé, La Fermade, Domaine Maby (Rhône), 2019 | 10,60€ | 9,54€ | £8.20 |
| Château de Pourcieux (Côtes de Provence), 2020 | 10,70€ | 9,63€ | £8.20 |
| "M" de Minuty Rosé, Château Minuty (Côtes de Provence), 2019 | 12,90€ | 11,61€ | £9.90 |
| Sancerre Rosé, Domaine Franck Millet (Loire), 2018 | 12,90€ | 11,61€ | £9.90 |
| Crémant de Bourgogne, Rosé, Bailly-Lapierre, Brut | 9,90€ | 8,91€ | £7.60 |
| Les Bulles de Fontenille, Crémant de Bordeaux Rosé, Brut | 11,90€ | 10,71€ | £9.20 |
| Richard-Dhondt, Cuvée Rosé, Premier Cru, Brut Champagne | 23,50€ | 21,15€ | £18.10 |
Deliveries
We are as always happy to deliver any quantity of wine to your home or office.
The EU guidelines set down in the 1990s said that if you’re not travelling with your wine purchases, then local duty in the customer’s home country should be paid. However it was long ago accepted that by sending individual cases via the new breed of fast international couriers, it was simply too difficult to monitor all goods without imposing delays and so a more pragmatic approach was adopted to allow free movement without additional checks or local taxes to pay. So for our small part we have been delivering across the EU for some long time so that people can take advantage of paying for their wines at the tiny French alcohol tax rates.
Deliveries across all of the EU are effected within a couple of days with no further charges or taxes to pay. So if you should wish to send a gift anywhere from Berlin to Bilbao, we will be happy to effect this for you within a few days.
However, since 1st January sending wine into the UK has become more complicated although we are pleased to be able to continue with this service. UK duty of £2.23 a bottle on still (or £2.86 on sparkling) wine is now payable when your bottles arrive in the UK, together with VAT on these sums - which reminds us all just how much tax is charged on wine in the UK!
There is a wine value threshold of 150€/£135 below which there appears to be no UK tax to pay, so smaller tax-free orders are still feasible. At least that should allow, as an example, 36 bottles of our ever popular Petit Pont to be delivered to you in the UK free of duty and additional tax!
We are pleased to have been able to reduce some delivery costs recently, especially on some of our larger deliveries. You can see the delivery scale for all countries here.
If you go to our new ordering system on http://boursot.co.uk/buy.html you will see that this strips out the French VAT and auto-calculates all charges that are payable in France. Then you need to add the UK’s tax to find the ultimate price you pay. For larger orders we have now received permission to export without charging the local VAT because it’s being charged at the same rate on arrival in the UK.
The only consolation in this bad news is that our wine is still less expensive than it would be if you bought it in the UK but it is simply not as cheap as it used to be. At the same time in the UK at the moment the price of European wine is rising owing to the new red tape and resulting additional costs. Of course the most economic way to buy remains to come across and pick up but of course that hasn’t been so easy recently.
As we have discovered more recently, sending in larger orders by pallet remains complicated (a gross understatement). First, so many transporters have given up on the UK market until such time as the border processes are better organised. The UK is still operating a paper-based system designed in 1985 for the importation of alcohol, whilst the rest of the world has gone electronic. We were in final negotiations with one major logistics company when it announced that “sorry, we are stopping work in the UK for the moment because of ongoing import and export problems”. Hmmmph!
Last week I was talking with two major British-based wine hauliers and they each told me they were not taking on any new customers owing to the concurrence of so many problems: delays caused by additional paperwork which has had a knock-on effect to the lead time on deliveries. This has caused wine companies to stockpile because of such uncertainty and all this, during the reopening of the hospitality sector. Combined with a shortage of drivers and lorries this has led to situations that are untenable. One of those hauliers confided to me that he had a waiting list of 110 companies waiting to open accounts with him. I understand that one of the biggest name hauliers is having such problems that it will only now work with one of the biggest supermarket chains and, even with that reduced capacity, is reviewing whether it needs the constant level of aggravation. There are serious supply problems building up under the current systems.
When collecting wines from Ardres
One can dream that one fine day cross-channel travel will resume to a semblance of normality so that you can enjoy once again some of the things that make the north of France such an easy and great day out.
The UK government says it has imposed new travel limits of 24 bottles of still wine and 12 bottles of sparkling per person when taking wine back to the UK. The government boasts that these are generous but casually omits to say that there were no travel limits prior to 1st January 2021! We have had customers here recently who, being mindful of such limits, then felt frustrated that they weren’t asked what they had on board - “If only I had taken more!” was one such cry on return to the UK. By contrast we had very recently a customer who on a day return came and collected just over 400 bottles of wine and took them back with absolutely no questions asked!
As yet there is no such thing as a red channel at the Eurotunnel border and I understand that there is resentment among the customs hierarchy because they received little or no consultation regarding implementation of the new policies decided on Christmas Eve 2020. We feel that provided you do not flaunt what you have on board, it is highly unlikely that you would be held up on your journey in order to fill in various new forms. And there is no talk of a fine so the worst that could happen to you is that you pay the UK duty that you would have had to pay if you had declared it! Regular customers might be relieved!
September Dinner Event
Our last newsletter announced a possible dinner for Saturday 25 September with a likely additional weekend event and we were very encouraged by the number of you who said you’d like to attend assuming that covid travel restrictions have been lifted. In fact the number of positive replies regarding this dinner has been sufficient to book the excellent Michelin starred Hotel la Matelote on the sea front in Boulogne.
At the moment we are awaiting more clarity on the virus and people’s ability to travel before making further progress or announcements, but if you should like to go on the short waiting list, do please let me know: there will be no commitment.
Boursot’s Views on the World of Wine
I was talking recently with an established British agent for many quality European vineyards who expressed concern about his potential reduction in income next year as a result of the tiny yields that are expected following the devastating frosts on 8th April. Between 50% and 80% potential loss has been recorded across France and the effects of this will be felt all the way from growers through to retailers. Unusually this happened all across Europe, as well as further afield: to areas as far apart as the Rhône and the Languedoc in France and the Veneto and Piedmont in Italy. There were high temperatures in the upper 20s that encouraged early bud break, followed swiftly by frost and ice.
Growers tell me that having had a combination of early warm weather, sudden frosts in April and then in recent weeks too much rain, 2021 will go down in the books as a “complicated” year. Domaine Maby in the Rhône tell me they only lost 10% to frost but a couple of weeks ago their vines were found to be suffering from “coulure” – an uneven flowering that causes some grapes not to develop and drop off the vine. This can be caused by poor photosynthesis during the vine’s flowering season or sometimes it can be caused by very warm conditions at the wrong time in the vine’s cycle.
And now they’re in the season of potential hail so satellite weather images are being scanned daily with a certain trepidation. Oh (not!) to be a vigneron: most producers take a five year view, but it is true to say that climate change has now become well embedded in the viticultural language.
In general in my home area of Beaune it appears that the Chardonnay vines were worse affected than those of the Pinot Noir. There was already not enough good wine to go around so the supply situation for Burgundy will be considerably worsened in 2022.
There are always those people who believe they can drink “identical” wines from other countries but of course grapes grown on different soils in different climates, do not taste the same. I have run many comparative varietal tastings across the world and at the end of each tasting there is always a general acceptance that as nice as each wine might be, their tastes are entirely different. Each year then brings different meteorological conditions and as wines age, they will take on different characters. It is after all what makes the world of real wine so diverse and so much fun. It is never boring!
Even in New Zealand, yields were devastated by frost and also there, I hear of additional problems due to sharply raised shipping and packaging costs owing to the pandemic. In 2021 one can foresee a mounting global wine supply problem.
We have talked here before about the transportation of glass bottles – why does everything from the cheapest plonk to Château Lafite-Rothschild have to be put into glass? The answer in the main appears to be about the perception of “glass = quality” in the same way that in certain areas, “screwcaps = cheap wine”. So far there seems to have been little attempt to give people a better informed message and so many wine suppliers are loathe to take the risk of selling wine in a container that might convey the wrong message when their competitors are not doing the same. Chicken and egg!
So, finally as climate change becomes more of a hot topic (sorry!), lighter bottles are finding more favour. Gone forever should be the days of those ultra-heavy bottles with deep punts that have been designed to sell themselves to us subliminally as “high quality”. Quality cannot be measured in the weight of its packaging! We can expect to see more innovative types of wine containers appearing in this world of fast changing climate.
You have heard me opine here before about buying your wines en primeur when, typically in Bordeaux, the grape juice is still lying in cask. Be very careful and remember that companies will take your money up-front on the promise of supplying you with your wine in two or three years’ time. With every major vintage there are new players in this futures market, some of whom are honest but many of them are not. Please, only use the blue-chip companies who have sound balance sheets and have been running such offers over many years. The Bordeaux market is currently releasing its 2020 vintage amidst a blaze of PR and in general the wines are excellent.
The 2020 Bordeaux harvest continues in the coincidence of turn-of-decade wines being great (with the exception of 1980, 1960 and 1950) and there are some marked price rises, despite a volatile global market.
There is news just coming in about the Saint-Emilion classification and how two of the top names, châteaux Cheval Blanc and Ausone, are refusing to take part any more. Unlike the Médoc classification, this one is re-run each 10 years and over recent times has caused many fights in court. Could this be a real threat to the time-honoured Bordeaux classification system? More on this soon.
We look forward to hearing from you again very shortly - and I hope to be seeing you again soon. As ever if ever you should like any specific advice on any aspect of wine, please feel free to contact me. I am always happy to do what I can to help.
With my best wishes
Guy
