Bordeaux Wine Vintage Quality and the Weather

The current Bordeaux marketing system has the character of an agricultural income stabilization system, and this may be its purpose. Complete income stabilization for the growers would require that the price of the young wines be inversely related to the quantity produced and independent of the quality. Although the actual pricing of young Bordeaux wines falls short of this ideal, it is clearly closer to it than would occur if purchasers used the information available from the weather for determining the quality of the wines. The producers do attempt to raise prices when crops are small, despite the evidence that the quantity of the wines (determined by the weather in the spring) is generally unrelated to the quality of the wines. Moreover, it is common for the proprietors to claim that each vintage is a good one, independent of the weather that produced it. Indeed, there is no obvious incentive for an individual proprietor to ever claim anything else.