"A great year"

This morning in the Télé matin show on France 2, a piece was aired promoting a new film “A good year” which is being released in France on January 3. In this piece, a great promotion on the story of garage wines, which partly inspired Ridley Scott:

«The story of this feature: a great year started when Ridley Scott and the writer Peter Mayle, friends since the 70s, met and drank a great bottle of wine at the end of the 20th Century. Peter recalls: “Ridley arrived with an newspaper article about new Bordeaux wines, “garage wines”, which fetched astronomical prices without any château, or pedigree. Still people were paying fortunes to acquire them.” Ridley Scott added: “I saw this article in the business section of the Times. It was about a French winery selling its garage wines for more than 45,000 euros per case. It was an article published in 1996, that I kept. At that time, I was looking for an opportunity to go back to France to shoot a new film, and this story seems perfect.»…

One can also mention Patrick Bernard’s interview in the French publication “Les Echos”:

«S.L. : For the past few years, we’ve been experiencing a series of good, if not excellent vintages. What is the level of contribution from global warming versus technical improvement?
P.B.: Bordeaux would not have reached this level of quality today without the contribution from garage wines. Although, themselves being a aberration, they contributed to extraordinary progress. Garage wines are produced on very small plots, considered at first average, by winemakers taking care of there patch of vines with as much attention as a vegetable garden. At the beginning, these pioneers started with little money, they installed their fermentation vats in their garage, hence the name of these wines. Their contribution has been to better take in account the essential part the vineyard has to play... »

When you think that in the past few years some announced the end of garage wines… As if one can ignore today the revolution which changed Bordeaux and the wine world barely 15 years ago!
In other words, as a French saying goes: “to throw the baby with the water from the bath”, which should be interpreted in this case as to get rid of an import fact in order to eliminate the problems and obligations which it creates.