Jane Anson: Bordeaux’s Honest Broker

There’s a perception that wine writing is a sweet gig and, if that’s true, then Jane Anson had one of the sweetest of them all – Bordeaux correspondent for Decanter magazine.

However, after almost 20 years of covering Bordeaux – and publishing a groundbreaking essential guide to the region, Inside Bordeaux – she is leaving the prestigious publisher to forge her own way. This week, she launched her own website, which will concentrate on the place where she has made her home.

We caught up with her as she was launching her new website.

After such a distinguished career as one of the most trusted wine writers – especially on Bordeaux – the big question is why now?

So I had been nearly 20 years working with Decanter in Bordeaux. And it was just getting more and more to the point where I’d kind of done it. I’d been a correspondent, I’d written a book about it and I just got to the point where I felt I was ready to really take the next step – to move on to the next stage. I thought I could see that there’s a real gap in the market for a website. I looked at Burgundy and it has five or six websites dedicated to it. There isn’t one in Bordeaux, for Bordeaux; when in fact, the market of Bordeaux is so important globally to the fine wine industry. So I could see there was a reason for it. And I’m based here, but I’m independent. I know I know this place very, very well. But I’m not French, and I’m not married to a château owner, and I have enough distance that I can be, I don’t know, an independent voice. And yeah, I think there’s a value to it.

So [the website is] basically similar to ones for other regions. IT costs €110 a year, and I’m going to have a professional level, which will be more detailed and I’ll make it easy for people to get those scores off if they’re wanting to use them. That’s going to launch in the next few months.

Let’s go back a little. How did you start off as a wine writer?

I was a journalist. I lived in Japan and Hong Kong after I graduated, and I was living in Hong Kong at the handover. So I was doing all that kind of fun journalism – news journalism and travel journalism. And then when I left Hong Kong, I went to Africa. I spent three months with a backpack, traveling through Africa on my own, and spent quite a lot of time in South Africa. But I went to Spier winery just it was like, I guess it must have been three years after apartheid finished, or something like that. And I interviewed a guy who was a Black South African who’d been living in New York working for Acker during apartheid. And then he came back to South Africa to kind of help build the new country – we all felt, obviously, the optimism at the time, so he came back and he got a job with Spier and he was the first Black South African to have a got a high profile job in the wine industry. Anyway, so I interviewed him as a journalist – not as a wine journalist. But it was so fascinating and it was a really great way into understanding all the kind of cool stuff that you can find in wine in terms of history and economics and all that. And then at the same time, I just started tasting, doing just normal wine tours and visits around Stellenbosch in that area. It was so gorgeous. For me it just kind of brought the whole wine thing alive. 

Back in the UK, I literally knocked on Decanter’s door and said, I’m here, can I help? They were like hey were like: “Oh, great, you’re a journalist. That’s exactly what we want – someone to get the news stories.” I’ve always found the news here fascinating.

Then had our first daughter. She was six months old in 2003. And we thought, well, we’ll just pop over to France for a year while I’m on maternity leave and just enjoy being in France. And we ended up in Bordeaux. And I thought as a journalist, even though I knew very, very little about wine, that Bordeaux held an interest for people and that there would always be the ability to write stories.

You just realize just what the fascinating region it is, and just how much history anchors Bordeaux into the wine world globally. It was just fascinating. The more you look, the more links there are with Australia with California within it. You think about Cabernet Sauvignon, the outward journey of Cabernet Sauvignon around the world that came from here – it’s just so interesting.

You live in Bordeaux, but you are also separate from it – is that a fair comment?

Yeah, I have my own home to cut back to an evening, I don’t have to get put up in the châteaus or enter into that side of things. Not that I’m not criticizing the journalists that do, I just mean it gives me a different viewpoint. And this is a complicated area; there are 6000 châteaus and they are changing all the time. There’s always something new happening and, I think, in the past couple of years, there are a couple of things that crystallize why I thought this was the right time to do it.

I’ve been based here and it’s become clearer and clearer the real value that I can add for people by living here. Over the past couple of years, not many people got to actually taste the wine. Like Château Palmer – I was the only one really who was able to taste them. And the difference between having a zoom call while tasting in a different country and being actually able to be here and visit became far, far clearer. And so it just I guess it gave me more confidence to think that I could be useful to people who are buying Bordeaux wines.

© Jane Anson
| The website is live now, and costs just €110 a year.

How is your website going to change how people interact with Bordeaux and its wines?

I’m trying to really get away from the idea of it just being about the highest scores. So in the launch content for the website, I’ve got the 100 best 2018 wines. I’ve done in a way where there are 50 to put aside, and then I’ve got 30 to drink now, and for the 30 to drink now the point of that is to say, this wine might have 93 points, or it might have 94 points, it might have 92 points. But these are worth looking at, these are worth following up – which is different from this idea of, it’s got to have 98 points, and it’s got to be an investment-grade [wine]. So, hopefully, you can start treating Bordeaux a bit more like you treat other regions. 

I’d like to give other specialists a voice on the site, so it’s not just me – to feature articles and reports from Bordeaux historians, scientists, economists, and other experts. I want it to be a subscription site, but still I’m trying to be a bit more open in terms of access. I’m going to do a week a year, which is going to be called a mentor week, where I’m going to bring people unfamiliar with the region to Bordeaux. I’ll give my time for free, but I’ll bring over like young people who might want to work in the wine industry. Or maybe people who want to be wine writers and who think Bordeaux is closed and snobby and all the things that people think about Bordeaux. I want to get them over to here and show them agroforestry projects or biodynamic initiatives, and also get them to taste old vintages – because that’s something that people don’t get to do very often – it’s so expensive. So, if you’re a subscriber, you’ll be able to nominate people in your team because probably the guys who want to come won’t be subscribers, but it could be the owner of a restaurant or a retailer [who] could nominate someone.

Do you think Bordeaux has a perception problem? 

I think I’m just conscious that it’s easy to dismiss Bordeaux, but the reality is it’s an important region globally for the fine wine trade and, therefore, if you work in the fine wine trade, it’s not bad for your career to know a bit about. So hopefully I can help a bit in terms of giving people the keys.

So much is changing in Bordeaux at the moment. There are international wines coming through the Place de Bordeaux – 10 years ago, it would have kind of been unimaginable to have 90 wines from outside of Bordeaux being sold through Bordeaux. And now it’s a huge part of the business. And then you have châteaux keeping more stock back, and how is that going to work? Will the broker system and the negociant system keep going? There are so many questions about how things are going to evolve in Bordeaux. 

Has climate change made much of an impact?

Producers have been getting vintages where everything worked out pretty well, even if it was challenging, and we’ve had, without a doubt, a more chaotic climate. You can’t exactly tell how it’s changing, but it’s much more chaotic. So we’ve had frost four out of the past five years, pretty much, which didn’t happen previously. And incredibly rainy springs and then hot, dry drought summers. Yeah, so they’ve had to cope with that, but it’s actually worked out well pretty much every year. This year 2021 has been chaotic, and I don’t think it’s worked out so well, in the end.

There’ll be some good wines as ever. The people with the money to have real manpower in the vineyards, you know, those guys will be fine, but this has been a much more challenging vintage than any other, I would say, since 2013. Some guys lost 50 percent anyway from the beginning of the year, so very tough.

How are those changes working through?

Well, I think that’s why this is such an interesting time right now, because so much has been brought back into question. If you look at the green developments, – you know, the organic, biodynamic, agroforestry, all that kind of stuff. Estates like Cheval Blanc that have pulled up 3000 vines to plant trees among their vineyards. So they’re not just planted around the outside, but actually, among the plots of vines. And there’s Lafite, same thing – if it’s pulling up three hectares of vines, which is a lot of money in terms of land value – there is a sense that they’re conscious of becoming more relevant and continuing to change and evolve.

Our data shows that the average price of a bottle of red Bordeaux hasn’t changed in eight years, while the top wines have seen healthy increases. Is that sustainable?

And, if you’re one of the small guys in Bordeaux, often it’s gone down.

I guess it’s like everything – the gap widens between them, the two ends of the market. But if you look at the history of Bordeaux, it has always been the case. One of the things I really find fascinating about Bordeaux is, if you look through history, you see who’s the dominant economic power of any given moment over the last 1000 years – like who is buying the top Bordeaux? It’s really a fascinating region for that. 

You mentioned earlier about being an independent voice. How does that work in a region so protective of its reputation?

I think it’s important to be clear that I am not here to promote Bordeaux; I’m trying to give a much more independent view. Sometimes you have people who will come over here and just be here for a little bit of time. And often when you read the notes, you think “that’s what the chateaux told you”. And I really hope that I can actually give people a much more independent view of what’s really happening and which are really the wines that are going to deliver value and are going to be nice and enjoyable to drink.

So finally, what’s your go-to wine?

Okay, so I guess region-wise, maybe the Rhône. I love the northern Rhône, particularly – Saint-Joseph, Hermitage, all those kind of areas. I drink them a lot at home. I also love really, really good Provence rosés – I do love a good rosé.