Keep claret British!

An attempt by the French to get down with the kids will see the end of centuries of tradition.

While the French have long been good at making wine, they haven’t always been so good at selling it. This is why champagne is dominated by German names like Heidsieck, Mumm, Krug etc. and the Bordeaux trade was the preserve of the English, Irish and Danes. Think of names like Barton, Cruse and Johnstone.

Andrew Jefford notes just this in New France (2002) which I have just revisited for Jancis Robinson’s site. He writes: “Incomprehensibility is France’s biggest problem in the world wine market… “ And he decries the “absurd pretentiousness, pomposity, and waffle of much French wine promotion”. Sometimes the French accidentally come up with a good selling point and then just when their customers have got the hang of things, change it. Like Vin de Pays, a term so evocative and easy to pronounce, that many people still use it even though it was replaced in 2009 by the surely deliberately uncatchy IGP (Indication Géographique Protégée).

To a long line of baffling marketing decisions comes a story that Victoria Moore covered in the Daily Telegraph at the weekend. The French have come up with a new style of Bordeaux to try and make it more ‘moderne’ and halt the slide of a wine that’s seen as mainly for old men in tweed. It’s going to be lower in tannin with a higher amount of residual sugar allowed, up to 7 g per litre. The idea is you stick it in the fridge making it more ‘smashable’ or perhaps ‘glou glou’ - in the parlance of natural wine enthusiasts

The new style may or may not catch on. I have had very nice modern style Bordeaux made in a lighter style with no oak which taste like Loire reds. These sort of wines are fashionable among a niche set but whether they will ever be mainstream is another matter. But that’s not the main problem, the real sticking point is the name they have chosen - claret.

Claret is currently an informal and slightly archaic name used by the British to describe red Bordeaux. It comes from a time when wine from Bordeaux was much lighter and more frivolous than what we now associate with the region. Since the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry II in 1152, vast quantities of a pale red wine known as ‘clairet’ were shipped across the channel. The name stuck even when the wine changed. Just to confuse things now, there’s a legally defined type of dark rosé from Bordeaux called clairet which is rarely seen over here.

If the French go ahead with this plan, the word ‘claret’ will legally mean a glou glou (sorry!) wine. One can imagine some ruddy Rutland type saying:

“Smashable! What the bloody hell are you talking about? Why would I want to smash my claret? You blithering idiot!”

But it won’t just make squires in the shires angry, it will be illegal for British wine merchants to use a term they have used for hundreds of years. Not more Tanner’s Claret, no more Good Ordinary Claret from Berry Bros & Rudd. As you can imagine some British wine merchants are irate, Moore quotes an incandescent James Tanner. His family have been importing Bordeaux for five generations and “Tanners Claret is our best-selling own-label,” he said. But it has too much tannin in to quality as the new ‘claret’.

According to Stephanie Sinoquet from AOC Bordeaux, the new category is designed to appeal to “a broader and younger audience”. Outside Parisian wine bars where the trade spends far too much time, I don’t think this audience is vast. The wines that are selling are things like prosecco and rosé (pale rosé sadly for Bordeaux). Meanwhile, guess who is still buying red Bordeaux in large quantities? The kind of customer who refers to it as claret. These people have money, love wine and they’re not dead yet. The whole thing smacks of a husband trading in his long-suffering, faithful wife for a flighty younger bottle who is not going to stick around. Or better still the politicians’ fallacy from Yes, Minister:

“We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.”

This style is meant to come in from the 2025 vintage onwards so should be appearing on the shelves soon. It gets worse. Chatting with Dan Kirby and Brad Horne on their Second Press podcast, episode out in a couple of weeks, they mentioned that term could in future refer to a style rather than a region. In other words you might see Rhone claret or Languedoc claret. Sinoquet commented in the Telegraph article: “The Rhône has indeed requested the possibility of using this term,” says. “Discussions are ongoing, and we are not in a position to comment at this stage.”

So there’s now ‘claret’, a light and perhaps slightly sweet wine that might in future come from anywhere in France, ‘clairet’ a dark Bordeaux rose, and amongst a certain affluent generation of customers, ‘claret’ meaning a traditional red. It’s not that I don’t think Bordeaux should offer lighter wines, I love Loire-esque light reds, it just seems odd to use a term that for many customers will mean the opposite of what it is intended to mean. How about Blondes like the lighter cigarettes from Gitanes and Gauloises? Bordeaux Blonde, it has a certain ring to it.