Négociant
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A négociant is a wine merchant who assembles the produce of smaller growers and winemakers and sells the result under its own name.
Négociants buy everything from grapes to grape must to wines in various states of completion. In the case of grapes or must, the négociant performs virtually all the winemaking. If it buys already fermented wine in barrels or 'en-vrac' - basically in bulk containers, it may age the wine further, blend in other wines or simply bottle and sell it as is. The result is sold under the name of the négociant, not the name of the original grape or wine producer.
Some négociants have a recognizable house style. For example, Georges Duboeuf was notorious for using yeast that produced a pronounced banana aroma.
Négociants were the dominant force in the wine trade until the last 25 years for various reasons:
- Historically the owners of vineyards and producers of wine had no direct access to buyers.
- It was too expensive for growers to purchase the wine presses and bottling lines necessary to produce a finished wine.
- Owning only a small portion of a particular high-quality single vineyard (lieu-dit) meant that a grower often had insufficient wine from a parcel to vinify on its own. Under French inheritance laws, vineyard holdings were often split until offspring owned no more than a single row of grapes, not enough to fill a barrel. Since prices for a premier cru are typically higher than for wines from a larger area like a village or region, the grower could make more money selling off the production as the premier cru rather than blending it into a less specific appellation.
Many négociants are also vineyard owners in their own right. In Burgundy for instance, négociants are the largest owners of vineyards. Well-known examples in Burgundy are Louis Jadot and Vincent Girardin, in Beaujolais Georges Duboeuf and Guigal and Jaboulet in the Rhône.
In the U.S., the term is rarely used. A company that buys grapes and ferments wine is simply a winery and those companies that purchase and blend bulk wines are often licensed as wholesalers and may own the brand name, but use a winery to perform the blending and bottling services. Wineries may produce wine for their own brands or can make wine for other brand owners (either other wineries or wholesalers). It is often difficult to tell exactly which company or winery made the wine. The very specific language, "Produced and bottled by" on the label does mean the winery bottling the wine fermented the wine, but any winery in the U.S. may add a trade name belonging to someone else to its permit to make and bottle wine for that other company or brand owner. An estate bottled wine is grown, fermented, and bottled by a winery that grew the grapes, fermented the wine, and bottled entirely within the appellation where the grapes were grown. Phrases such as "cellared and bottled by" or "vinted and bottled by" means that the bottling winery did not ferment or produce the wine, but bottled it. It may have also blended the wine with several other wines, as négociants do in Europe.
