Written whilst in Southwold!
My family and I are spending this Christmas in lovely Southwold.
Southwold is known for:
Being generally quite nice. The internet tells me it is sometimes referred to as “Hampstead-on-Sea”. I will choose to believe this is because Hampstead is also quite a nice place, and not due to the influx of Londoners wanting a seaside second home.
Adnams Brewery (recommend Kobold if you like lager and Broadside if you’re into ales)
Its relative isolation – it was historically almost an island, connected to the mainland only by a single road across the marshes.
Southwold is also an important word in the wine world.
The “Southwold Group” has tasted the top wines of Bordeaux together for over 40 years. This used to take place (no prizes for guessing) in Southwold, but it has now moved to Farr Vintners, where tasting happens in a purpose-built modern tasting room.
The tastings began when a group of prominent UK wine merchants and critics decided to create a systematic approach to evaluating Bordeaux vintages. They chose Southwold as their venue due to its removal from the commercial pressures of London and the wine trade’s usual haunts.
The Southwold Tastings are particularly important for several reasons:
First, they represent one of the most comprehensive evaluations of Bordeaux wines outside of France. The group typically tastes through 100-150 wines per session, covering all the major appellations and virtually every significant château.
Second, the collective experience of the tasters – who include leading merchants, critics, and writers – provides a unique perspective that combines commercial insight with technical expertise. This combination has proven invaluable in predicting how wines will develop and perform in the market.
Third, the timing of the tastings, several years after the vintage, offers a more measured view than the frenzied en primeur tastings that occur when the wines are still in barrel.
From an outsider’s perspective, I think the third point is the real beauty behind the Southwold tastings.
They represent something increasingly rare in today’s world: a long-standing tradition that prioritises careful, considered evaluation over immediate judgement.
We live in an era of instant opinions and rapid-fire social media reactions, an entire vintage can be discarded as meaningless, or put on a pedestal based on a few weeks of in barrel tastings.
Reasons why the above is true which may be hard for Bordeaux to admit
- Bordeaux needs proponents. To caveat this, I definitely view this through more of an ‘investment lens’ than most. It cannot however be denied that the most recent En Primeur campaign(s) did not work for most Chateaux. Having a group of the most high-profile critics and merchants shining a (relatively) unbiased light on the great wines from recent vintages gives drinkers and collectors the impetus to identify, and (more importantly) buy Bordelaise wine.
- Bordeaux needs wine investors. Sara Danese, CFA wrote a great article about this. It’s linked here, and I’ll post an excerpt below.
“Investors, collectors, and people who buy wine En Primeur are essentially financing the châteaux. Without the EP system, châteaux would need to go to a bank and borrow all the costs to grow and make that wine against, say, a 10% interest rate until the wine is ready to be sold.”
“Some can survive without it, but many cannot.”
For fine wine investors to be interested in Bordeaux, the wines must have two key characteristics. They need to be sold at a price which allows room for upwards movement, and there needs to be continued demand for back vintages of Bordeaux. The first point is down to the Chateaux, the second is driven by people like the Southwold Group.
