CIVB...suite

While waiting for my meeting at the bar of the CIVB last Monday, I had the time to talk with some of the communication staff.

One of the important activities of the CIVB is education, Mr Troquard told me: an impressive number of tourist (I think I understood 30,000?!) take a 2 hour course in the CIVB to discover Bordeaux. The Bordeaux tourist office located across the street is a nice place, with no fuss, which probably explains its success. But as the saying goes: “who from the hen or the egg arrived first”?

Equally Bordeaux wine schools have opened all over the world. This should interest any distributors to have such centers teaching Bordeaux wines in their area.

Even better: education centers should be created for members of wine departments of supermarket chains (and why not include wine stores?)
I left convinced that the direction in communicating on Bordeaux is good, as they are so different, so complex with history old as well as new, traditional and avant-garde.

Bordeaux is still moving: a film is going to be shot in around 20 properties.

Jean-Marc Quarin (www.quarin.com) writes, in his column N° 43, about a few wines from the 1998 vintage and makes the following comment: Pomerol dominates this vintage and 1998s are often superior to 2000 and equal to 2001. I am OK with this, with certainly a few exceptions, but unfortunately, I drink less Pomerol than before. Denis, if you read me…

In any case, this vintage offers a great deal of pleasure today, in Pomerol or even in Saint Emilion.

We offered our clients the Blanc de Valandraud N°2 which will be perfect to drink at the end of the year.

The futures campaign is almost over, the revenues and numbers of bottles sold is much less than for 2005, which, it is true, was exceptional. We are falling back on the level of 2001. The activity on wines delivered will be more than 30% from last year, which was a small year. We will pass the 1 million Euro mark and probably more than 1 million bottles delivered!