Newsletters
 March, 2010
Dear Customer,
Our newsletters can be unfashionably verbose, so if you prefer to go straight to a particular topic, the main headings are below.
Current Cross Channel Fare Deals
As a Boursot’s customer, you can get specially priced day return trips on SeaFrance at £23 for a car and all passengers Sundays to Fridays, and £30 for Saturdays. As always, these fares are only available by calling the Ferry Travel Club on 01304 501100 (new telephone number) and by quoting our code "Boursot". You do not pay a membership fee.
Also if you spend more than 500€ with us, we will be happy to reimburse your day return fare booked through the Ferry Travel Club, so please remember to bring along your receipt.
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Forthcoming Boursot Events
Boursot’s next major Wine Dinner will be on Saturday 24th April at Hotel Château Tilques, just outside Saint-Omer, with the vineyard owner and winemaker Gilles Ferran from Domaine des Escaravailles in the village of Rasteau. Gilles is fast becoming a legend in the southern Rhône, and he is now producing some exquisite wines with which you may have become familiar. Despite having been highly rated by the American wine writer Robert Parker, these wines still offer superb value for money. We are indeed honoured to have him as our guest presenter.
Gilles will be coming up especially from the Rhône for our dinner and to talk about some of his extra-ordinary wines that will be on show, which should also include wines from some of his neighbours in the villages of Roaix and Châteauneuf du Pape. I hope that you will join us at this dinner which we know already will be an excellent evening. Tickets are priced at 79€ and for your stay at the château we have managed to secure substantially reduced rates of 159€ per room with breakfast included.
Friday 4th – Saturday 5th June, Gourmet Experience in Champagne: We have some spaces available for our Special Gourmet Dinner in Champagne which will also incorporate visits to producers in Epernay and Reims. The price will be 350€ per person, to include our Gourmet Dinner, two lunches, 3 star hotel, breakfast and visits to three contrasting champagne houses as well as all transport within the region.
From experience, we know that this will be a fun and memorable trip. If you should be interested, please do let us know as soon as possible so as to get your name on the list which will close at the end of March. More details will then be sent to you as they unfold.
To quote a testimonial from someone who came on one of our trips to Champagne: "It was well organised and most interesting. We will particularly long remember the tour, tastings, lunch and cordial reception at Pol Roger." (DB)
Sunday 11th July, La Fete de la Belle Roze: Lunch at Hotel Clément.
Watch the centre of Ardres come alive with its biennial pageantry celebrating La Belle Roze who saved the destruction of Ardres in July 1653. Our informal mid-summer lunch at the Hotel Clément at just 49€ per person to include as always 4 courses, 6 wines, water, coffee and a sparkling talk from me about the current state of affairs in the wine world.
Saturday 25th September: Dinner with Martin Krajewski of Château de Sours.
Martin hosted an evening of wonderful wine and complete entertainment for us last September at Hôtel Château Tilques near Saint-Omer and so positive was the reaction that we have decided to run another dinner with his various wines this September.
To explain "various": Martin a few years ago acquired Château de Sours which is acknowledged to produce one of Bordeaux’s great rosé wines; he has also bought Clos Cantenac, a Grand Cru château in Saint Emilion which, through rigorous selection, produces some very long-lived wines from the specific terroir in this area of the "right bank"; and as if that were not enough, Martin has started the Songlines Estate in Australia’s McLaren Vale where he and John Duval, the former winemaker of Penfold’s legendary Grange Hermitage, are crafting a wine that has already been described as the Latour of Australia (that’s Château Latour not Louis Latour of course, before you ask!).
With an evening of excellent food and stimulating company, we will be enjoying at least six great wines from these different estates with our reception and dinner. At an all-in price of 73€ per person, you can see that this offers amazing value and again, we have blocked off for you a number of rooms at the château to complete your getaway experience! Our substantially reduced rate is 159€ per room with breakfast included.
Sunday 12th December, Christmas Market: Lunch at Hotel Clément.
We are of course flattered that some of you have already booked for our 2010 Christmas lunch which has become the fun highlight of the year. Last year rather than spoon more people into the lunch, we had to turn people away after the numbers got to 60, so this year if you would like to guarantee your places, we can happily take your bookings now.
That morning the annual Turkey Festival in the village of Licques will be held in the morning, and then I suggest come to the lunch and then "do" the Christmas Market in the afternoon, when our spirits and the general atmosphere have warmed up! Père Noël is normally to be found abseiling down the church spire at around 6pm. The lunch comprises 4 courses and 6 wines at a price of just 49€ per person all-inclusive. It is a great inexpensive day out and accommodation can of course be arranged for you, should you wish to stay over.
There will be several other events during 2010 but these are the only ones where all details are known currently.
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News in the World of Wine
I was saddened to hear of the recent death, at the age of 94, of Tony Berry, who was chairman of Berry Bros & Rudd during my 17 formative years there. "AAB" as he was often referred to in-house, was a kindly man who maintained many of the traditions and customs that have now all but disappeared from the commercial world.
In my early days at Berrys’, cash sales were almost frowned upon (and of course cards hardly existed then) and customers were invariably offered 30 days’ credit. I used to feel sorry for AAB’s long-suffering secretary who would take dictation each and every morning. More often than not the letters were thank yous to each new customer who had bought from Berrys’ the previous day. There was no standard letter: each one referred to the specific wines that were bought. Of course looking back on it now, it all makes such good sense and whilst we can all bleat on about not having the time nowadays, as was so often the case in that yesteryear, AAB’s priorities lay in making the time to say thank you and the company gained business from customers feeling that they were cared for.
He always made time to share his enthusiasm with any customer, whether they were new or existing. And that was a lesson I hope to have learned!
Whenever AAB tasted a good wine, he would ask for a scrap of paper and note down his immediate sensory thoughts on that wine. When he got home these backs of envelopes and scraps of paper would then be transcribed into a diary which of course became a huge encyclopaedia of wine notes on so many of the great wines stretching back over 70 years. To my knowledge Michael Broadbent who headed Christies, is the only other person to have kept such notes during his professional lifetime and I know that like AAB, Michael is now facing the conundrum of what to do with his collection of snapshots into vinous history. Both of these gentlemen have maintained that these notes were collected for their own private use rather than for any commercial gain.
Only a few weeks before the former chairman’s death, Berry Bros & Rudd sold off its Scots whisky brand Cutty Sark which was created at the end of the First World War by the then partners of BB&R. Whilst the brand was relatively obscure in Britain, it became hugely popular in the USA as a result of comparatively good distribution during Prohibition, and over the last 30 years it found further fame across the globe. For many years, it was no secret that Cutty Sark supported the wine endeavours of BB&R – indeed even in 1989, 90% of the wine firm’s consolidated turnover was attributable to whisky. Over recent years, Berry Bros has grown enormously as a wine company and is no longer dependant on its sales of whisky. In the sale of Cutty Sark which will be announced officially in April, Berry Bros has bought the Scots whisky brand Glenrothes, so it will be interesting to see the complete details of this transaction.
You may have been following in these newsletters the cork versus closure saga. Only a few weeks ago, the Portuguese government announced that it was set to spend €20 million on publicising the several "benefits" of us choosing cork, which of course comes primarily from Portugal. And over the last few days I hear that NuKorc, the world’s second largest synthetic closure maker, has filed for bankruptcy, apparently being hit primarily by the strength of the Australian dollar and the global decline in wine sales. The administrators are looking to sell off the several parts of the business which include plants in South Australia, California and Spain. The fight goes on.
In Chile, the earthquake has left much damage in the main Central Valley vineyard area. Fortuitously there has been little or no loss of life in this region, but disruption has been great in an area where harvesting of this year’s grapes is supposed to start in just a few weeks’ time. The vintage 2010 in Chile will be one to remember for all the wrong reasons.
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E-mails
In case you missed it last time, some weeks ago we had problems with our e-mail system but have now changed server which seems to be providing us with a more efficient service.
The two addresses wine.consultants@aliceadsl.fr and guy.boursot@aliceadsl.fr will cease to exist very shortly, but you can use each of these by replacing the suffix aliceadsl.fr with orange.fr. Our main address of ardres@boursot.co.uk will of course continue to operate as normal.
If you had written to us and not received a response, please resend your message and as soon as it’s received, I will respond to you.
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Boursot’s New List
As always you can see our new list on this link and if you would like to print it, it’s available on this link. This month, look out for the return of some favourites from Alsace such as Robert Faller’s extra-ordinary Riesling Trottacker, a dry Muscat, a Pinot Noir and an additional Vendanges Tardives wine in handy 50cl bottles. As you will have read here, 2009 was a year when growing conditions in Alsace were near perfect and we can expect to see these coming on-stream from around 9 months’ time.
Generally 2009 across France was an excellent year for vine growing. There was fantastic weather all through the summer (even here in Ardres - sorry to those of you who didn’t!) and there was a light sprinkling of rain just before harvest time, just enough to complete the perfect conditions for a high quality harvest – and most unusually that applied, to a greater or lesser extent, throughout the disparate areas of France. The only irritant in 2009 was in June when hail arrived, devastating several vineyard areas. As a result, we should not expect prices to come down and any increases that producers may have in mind will be restrained, because of the global economic difficulties.
The en primeur tastings of 2009 Bordeaux take place in Bordeaux very shortly for wine journalists and merchants and after that there will be much noise about the quality, which even at this early stage, by all accounts, is going to be one of the greatest years. Fine claret is a brand in which investors around the world can sometimes profit well, so yet again these limited supply wines will not provide great value for money.
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March Offers
As always with our Offers, you can reserve your requirements for collection at a later date. Please let us know what you’d like on ardres@boursot.co.uk and I will acknowledge receipt of your order.
This month our Special Offer in white wine is on our exquisite Château Marie du Fou from the Vendée, reduced from 8,00€ to 7,40€ (about £6.70 at today’s exchange rate). This wine has got several of our customers into raptures, typically: "thank you for what is a magnificent wine at the price. Well at any price…. Anyway the Chateau Marie du Fou is superb. I know my wines a little …your prices and taste are something not seen by me before." (TM)
The point about this wine is that it is "different". It is made from blending 70% Chenin Blanc with 30% barrel-fermented Chardonnay. The wine is fresh and dry but has several delicate flavours that run through your mouth. "Mad Mary" is guaranteed to impress even your most demanding dinner guests and the wine will remain good yet for another 10 years: over that time of course it will change but, to my taste, it will remain delicious.
For our red this month, we are reducing the price of Château de Sours, Bordeaux Rouge, 2006 from 8,30€ to 7,90€ (around £7.20). You might have been forgiven for thinking that Château de Sours only produced rosé, but it does in fact also produce several other exceptional wines such as this delicious claret made exclusively from 40 year old Merlot vines – creating concentrated rich and soft flavours. Come to our September Dinner (as featured above under Forthcoming Events) to find out more about this château’s great new quality wines.
And if you like rosé, don’t forget to look out for our permanently attractive price of just 5,90€ (around £5.40) on Château de Sours Rosé 2008. Whilst other retailers may bleat about their special prices (blah, blah!) of £8.99 reduced occasionally to £6.99, you will find that we have, at around £5.40, the best net prices of any retailer (that I have yet come across).
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General
Wine is of course the one shopping item that still continues to be considerably less expensive here in France than in the UK. The reason for this is simply that there is next to no excise duty here – you are not giving almost £2 per bottle straight to HM Customs & Excise as you do in Britain. I am always intrigued to hear people say that it’s not worth crossing the channel any more because of the euro, but wine is still way outside the impact of the exchange rate! For instance, our prices start with a very reasonable and gluggable Minervois at 2,40€ which even at today’s rate is around £2.20.
People frequently tell me about the beleaguered offerings of French wines on offer at British retailers, and notably in British supermarkets which have reacted to the recession by cutting the choices available. I should hardly need to remind you that "mass retailing" is exclusively about making profit whereas buying your wine from smaller retailers enables you to build a relationship and thereby a trust. Usually you can taste the wines and often there are wine related events such as Gourmet Dinners that give you an opportunity to expand your vinous horizons. Of course we smaller retailers want to make profit but first and foremost we want to see you back and so we need to keep you happy.
Mind you, I am preaching to you as the already converted and you know that coming over is also about getting away for a complete change of pace, having a great lunch and then shopping for all those various items that you can only find in French shops and supermarkets. But do feel free to spread the word! I suspect that as campaigning for the General Election heats up, you may feel it necessary to escape for a day.
The next Budget on 24th March has the Government’s automatic duty escalator which will add more tax to a bottle, and then presumably there will have to be an emergency Budget shortly after the Election which is likely to add even more fiscal pain. But not if you buy your wines in France.
Enough said…?
I hope to see you here again very shortly!
With my best wishes
Guy
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Guy Boursot
Wine Consultants SARL
Boursot's Wine Collection
9 Rue de l'Arsenal
62610 ARDRES
+33 3 21 36 81 46
www.boursot.co.uk
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