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Looking ahead
Sally Easton looks at the merits of the 2008 grape harvest
in northern Europe and spies out the possible bargains
For the northern hemisphere, the wine
grape harvest mostly happens from
August, in the hot Mediterranean areas, to
November, in the cool northern latitudes.
Which means, from the back end of the year,
all the talk is of the quality and quantity of the
harvest in France, Italy and Spain, the top three
wine-producing nations in the world. At the
crunchy, sub-£5 end of the market, wine buyers
and traders are all jockeying for position,
building a picture of the new vintage, where
prices are likely to be going, and how to secure
enough volume of the right wine for their
brands.
It’s a busy time of year behind the scenes in
the wine industry, organising the next 12months’
worth of stocks. It would be a bit like
having to order all your food shopping for the
entire year, with it being delivered and paid for
each week. How much will you need? How
much entertaining are you going to do? How
often will you be on holiday? Which range of
supermarkets, high-street shops and internet
shops will you choose to build up your stocks
of comestibles? It’s a pretty big budgeting and
forecasting exercise. Get it right and
everything’s hunky-dory; get it wrong, and risk
running out of wine for customers, risk paying
over the odds, risk not getting good enough
quality wine because somebody’s been there
before you and snapped up all the best goodies.
Spain has produced a similar-sized crop to
last year, but the 2008 harvest in France saw
that country’s fortunes continue to fall. It had
one of its smallest harvests in a long time,
about 15 per cent down on 2007, which was
already the smallest harvest since the year 2000.
All of this, of course, means higher prices
because there’s less wine to go round. And
without wanting to paint a really gloomy
picture, we all know that sterling is losing value
fast, and anything bought in the Euro-zone is
much pricier.
Italy, on the other hand, with something of
a bumper harvest, overtook France in 2008, to
become the world’s biggest wine producer. It
hasn’t done this in about a decade. Sicily had a
lot to do with this, producing 50 per cent more
wine than it did in 2007. But in itself, this
doesn’t mean too much, because in 2007 Sicily
produced half what it had in 2006, so really, it’s
just back to ‘normal’ production. But if there
is any bargain to be had from the 2008 vintage,
it may well be Sicilian. V
TRY THESE
2008 vintage wines from the northern
hemisphere won’t be on the market for
another few months, and then only ‘entry
level’ wines. In the meantime, these are
good to try:
Marks & Spencer:
Baglio Rosso Nero d’Avola 2007, Italy £5.49
Domaine de Planterieu, VdP des Cotes de
Gascogne 2007, France £4.79
D’Angelo, Aglianico del Vulture 2005, Italy
£12.49, or £9.99 each for 2 bottles
(3 February to 2 March)
wine wisdom v
Sally Easton MW (Master of Wine) is a wine educator and freelance writer.
She teaches consumer classes and runs corporate seminars via her wine school. www.winewisdom.com
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