Quality wine, sans the estate price
By Andre Lopez
Sometimes I daydream about one day owning my own winery in some picturesque place like Napa or Sonoma. Then the stark reality of what it takes to start up a winery operation rudely sets in.
The sheer amount of capital required to purchase a plot of vineyard land, build a facility, purchase equipment, and then wait several years before you even release your first vintage makes my head spin. I started thinking about other ways to break into the industry without laying out all that dough, and that's when the concept of wine negociants popped in my head.
Popularized by early merchants in the Burgundy region of France, a negociant (pronounced neh-go-see-ahn) is a French term for a wine merchant who assembles the grapes of smaller growers and winemakers and then sells the finished product under their own name. Negociants buy everything in various states of completion, from grapes to finished barrels of wine.
Historically, negociants were utilized for various reasons. For one, the owners of vineyards and producers of wine had no direct access to buyers. Negociants were specialists in bringing products to market and thus provided that access. Secondly, it was oftentimes too expensive for growers to purchase the winemaking equipment necessary for producing a finished wine, so voila, the negociant was born.
If you've ever bought a bottle of Louis Jadot, E. Guigal or the ubiquitous Georges Dubeouf Beaujolais Nouveau, then you've had a negociant wine. In fact, these are some of the biggest negociant houses in France and some of the most recognizable names on U.S. store shelves.
American consumers have a tendency to hold in higher regard wines that come from a specific area, "estate," or bottles identified by a single variety such as cabernet sauvignon or chardonnay.
Consumers shouldn't be quick to pass off negociant wines as being subpar, simply because they are not sourced from a single producer. Grapes and finished wine from many of these farmers and wineries are often actually high quality. Some years though, the finished wine or grapes just don't measure up to the quality the winemaker is looking for in the final product, so selling off the excess juice to a negociant becomes one of the few viable business options.
Cameron Hughes' namesake winery goes so far as to bottle wines that have not been "back blended," meaning the wines have not been blended with lesser-quality grapes to fix flaws or improve quality. What you get is a wine in which the quality level stands on its own.
As far as their contributions to the industry are concerned, larger negociants like Hughes and Sebastiani help provide liquidity in a traditionally cash flow-tight industry by sopping up excess inventory from vintners, farmers and brokers.
What about the bottom-line to the consumer? If you're willing to trade off the cachet and price of an estate-bottled wine for something sensible and affordable for everyday drinking, look no further than wines bottled by negociants. They offer great wine, representative of a wine region and its grapes, without all of the associated costs of producing and distributing the wine.
