Customer Reviews

What Price Bordeaux?

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
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A very well written and easy to follow book about one of the most difficult to understand wine producing regions in the world. Mr Lewin goes in depth into many of the forces that have shaped Bordeaux and its many diferent regions, wines, and styles. He explains with exquisite details the historical, cultural, political, financial, marketing and climatic elements, as well as the many paradoxes, that have contributed to make Bordeaux what it is today. Mr Lewin's book is well balanced, he writes about the positive aspects but is equally candid about the many scandals and ploys of the wine trade. He has done a wonderful job researching facts and the many graphics in the book are very clear and easy to follow. This is a book where the expert will learn many things unknown before, and the novice will acquire a universe of knowledge, not only about Bordeaux, but also about wine in general.

Lewin has written a book with a wealth of information and wonderful presentation of descriptive statistics. He is also a persuasive historian, going back to the beginning of the wine trade in Bordeaux that preceded wine production. In his narrative, he makes much of the current dtrials and tribulations of the region seem reactionary and short sighted.

My one wish for the book, and I wished for it almost every page, was that Lewin was an economist. He's got all this great information that circumscribe important issues of the wine trade, but uses none of it in making any actual arguments. For example, he skewers the notion that the 1855 Classification was based on anything other than prevailing and historic prices for wine of the ranked chateaux. But then fails to connect the argument that pricing is a proxy for all the information the Bordelais supposedly failed to attend to: terroir, quality, etc. What a person is willing to pay for a product is an aggregation of all known information!

From his exhaustive narrative, it is clear that the Bordeaux wine trade is a train wreck of an economic market. Yet that does not preclude economic analytical tools from making sense of the morass. It's an excellent book and I wanted still more.

Repetitious but still interesting. If you are interested in wine brands this is an exploration of branding in bordeaux (e.g. the 1855 classification, and others) and how it affects price along with other factors such as terroir.

For fine wine marketers this is one of the most interesting books available.

This is the most unusual book on wine I've ever encountered. It's written more like a combination of a science book, history book, and economics book. It covers virtually everything imaginable about Bordeaux wine in an extremely well-written, easy to understand volume. It's packed full of tables and charts that visually illustrates the points being made. The author covers the history, classification, politics, and finances associated with Bordeaux wines. One story after another provides a rich context to how Bordeaux has evolved to become the most famous wine region.

But Mr. Lewin maintains complete objectivity and tells the good and the bad about the region. Even the fact that substantial quantities of Bordeaux wines are so bad they are used to fuel vehicles. The book is full of rich stories always backed by statistics. One example is how the prices of wine varies by the scores given by Robert Parker. I relished each page that I felt really provided knowledge I could get no where else. Reading this and remembering just 10% will give you more knowledge than a decade of the Wine Spectator.