The last two decades have seen a revolution in Bordeaux. What Price Bordeaux? takes a novel approach in explaining the forces responsible for this change. The top chateaux have been obtaining unprecedented prices for their wines, while at the same time smaller chateau owners are going bankrupt. Enormous changes in the production and style of wine have been accomplished by advances in viticulture and vinification coupled with climatic changes. The battle between modernists and traditionalists plays out through the garage wines, felt by some to be the newest wave, and by others to be a caricature of Bordeaux. Pulling together information from a variety of sources including the market in Bordeaux, changing patterns of ownership, and new possibilities in viticulture and vinification, and this book presents a unique overview of the forces making Bordeaux wine what it is today. The book considers the role of terroir, how events ranging from the phylloxera plague to global warming have changed the fundamental nature of Bordeaux, the mysteries of the en primeur system, the rising influence of oenologues and critics, the changing nature of the wine itself, and the rise and fall of various chateaux. A running theme is the powerful effect that the classification of 1855 continues to have on the chateaux of both Left and Right Banks, and this and the other classification systems are considered before concluding with a new classification of the chateaux based on the existing market. Illustrated

The last two decades have seen a revolution in Bordeaux. What Price Bordeaux? takes a novel approach in explaining the forces responsible for this change.

"Experts may help to fill a lack of information to non-expert wine consumers. In the literature, the true impact of experts on the pricing of wine is unclear. Do they really influence the price? Is there a Parker effect? Or are meteorological conditions predominant? We use a dataset concerning the scores attributed to wines from France, Spain and United States by 19 experts over the period 2000-2010 and the corresponding meteorological conditions. The data aims to avoid endogeneity and bias rooted in errors of judgment. We show that Bordeaux wine prices are very sensitive to expert ratings, but this impact is not higher than it is for Californian wines or Spanish wines. Furthermore, we did not find any direct evidence of a Parker effect for Bordeaux wine, but a presumption of measurement errors of any individual expert."--Page 1.