(Manfred Klimek)
There are catastrophes in winegrowing that happen because climate, weather, pests and politics cause them: frost, hail, phylloxera, war. And then there are declines that take place almost silently. Nobody demonstrates against them, nobody writes manifestos, nobody glues themselves to wine barrels. The bottles simply remain unsold. Year after year, a little longer. Until at some point it becomes clear that it is not merely a market that is shrinking here, but an entire cultural technique that is disappearing.
That is precisely what is currently happening to the great sweet wines from Sauternes.
Those wines, then, which together with Tokaj belonged for centuries among the most precious things European winegrowing could produce. Liquid gold, revered by kings, collected by tsars, described by writers and treated by wealthy citizens like liturgical objects. Today, mature bottles of these wines can sometimes be found at prices that seem almost absurd in relation to their quality – like a joke. And Château d'Yquem has scarcely been able to benefit from the price race of the past thirty years. The customers are dying off; a new clientele is precisely zero per cent interested in wines from Sauternes. Anyone browsing at the Alpina merchant, for example, will often find old vintages of great Sauternes cheaper than mediocre young wines from fashionable natural-wine regions.
And yet hardly anyone buys them.
This is particularly tragic in the case of estates such as Château Suduiraut or Château Doisy-Daëne. Suduiraut has been one of the world's greatest sweet-wine names for decades: monumental, complex, almost immortal. A wine that can easily age for more than fifty years without showing even the slightest hint of tiredness. Doisy-Daëne, meanwhile, possesses that aristocratic elegance that used to be called ‘upper class’, without irony and without shame. Less weighty than Suduiraut, but often more moving. Wines full of saffron, candied citrus fruit, apricot, honey, smoke and that scarcely describable shimmer which only noble rot, Botrytis, can produce.
Because the truth is brutal: these great sweet wines now sell only in quantities that are scarcely sufficient for the economic reality of modern top estates. The consequences have long been visible. More and more châteaux in Sauternes are drastically reducing their sweet-wine production or are also making dry white wines. Some of these are excellent. Suduiraut, for example, now makes remarkably precise dry Bordeaux blancs. But the strategic direction behind this is obvious: they are trying to survive.
Because the sweet wines remain unsold like lead.
The reasons are surprisingly difficult to identify precisely. Certainly, the world eats and drinks differently today. Fewer heavy meals, fewer grand tables, fewer opulent desserts. The ritual of sweet wine after a meal has almost completely disappeared. Added to this is the present-day caution around alcohol, in which even a glass of wine is debated morally; a concentrated Sauternes, often at 14% alcohol, all the more so.
But that only partly explains the decline.
Because at the same time, sugar continues to boom brutally in almost every other area of consumption. Soft drinks, patisserie, ice cream, bubble tea and energy drinks are not fighting for survival. The problem therefore seems to be less the sugar itself than the cultural coding of these wines. To many young consumers, Sauternes seems like a drink from a vanished world. From a world of silver spoons, hunting parties and heavy curtains.
Yet these wines were never merely sweet. Great Sauternes balance their sweetness with acidity, bitterness, spice and an almost cutting freshness. Technically, they are among the most complicated wines of all. Production is highly risky. Botrytis only works under very specific climatic conditions. The grapes are often harvested by hand in several passes, selected berry by berry. Yields are minimal, and the risk of total loss is enormous.
Things are looking gloomy in Tokaj as well. For years, they tried to establish dry wines as a model for the future there, because the classic Aszú wines were becoming increasingly difficult to sell. Partly successfully. But there too, it is now becoming clear: the centuries-old culture of great sweet wines is no longer economically reliable.
What we are experiencing at present may therefore be more than merely a change in taste. It is the slow farewell to a European idea of luxury that was taken for granted for centuries: that patience, complexity, ageing potential and abundance represent cultural values in their own right.
The sweet wines from Sauternes or Tokaj no longer quite fit into an age of perpetual acceleration. They demand calm. Attention. Slowness. These wines will probably never disappear entirely. Their history is too great, their style too unique. But they could become something that would have seemed unthinkable only a few decades ago: a small, almost archaeological fringe culture within the wider world of winegrowing.
And that would be a loss extending far beyond Bordeaux and Hungary.