Jean-Claude Lapalu makes beaujolais that’s as thick as blood and as soulful as a patch of wilderness. He is a humble man, a paysan, but also one of the region’s stars. A bottle of Lapalu Brouilly sells in a shop for ￡20 or more.
“Why not make more of it and get rich?” I asked him as we sat outside at a scruffy table near his winery a couple of years ago. “Land in Beaujolais is relatively cheap. You could buy more vineyards…” He regarded me wearily. “It’s already completely exhausting me,” he said with a shrug at the madness of the idea. “I’m not sure it could be done.”
Lapalu is unusually attentive. He does not just work organically, he labours over every detail. He is interested in energy lines and biodynamics; he has used the golden mean to determine the ratio of length to breadth, and even the size of the bricks, in his winery; he pours his entire being into wines that are in every sense handmade. This makes them expensive. Not as expensive as they might be were they from a more fêted area, but still.
I thought of Jean-Claude Lapalu when I opened an email from Telegraph reader Geoffrey Keen asking if I could explain the variation in price of an ordinary (as opposed to a cult or collectable) bottle of wine.
“I can understand that small vineyards and older vintages would tend to have rarity value,” wrote Mr Keen, “and that growers, agents and retailers all need their cut, but can you account for why one might cost a fiver, another quite easily five times as much?”
Where to start on all the rest? It begins, of course, with the grapes. You could plant a load of vines on relatively fertile soil (ideally a valley floor which won’t grow you such good grapes as a slope but will be easier and therefore cheaper to work), leave them to run riot, machine harvest a huge quantity of grapes in a single pass come the autumn and then ferment them, willy-nilly and unsorted, in bulk. That would be the cheapest way to start filling a bottle of plonk.
Look to improve the quality of the grapes, a limiting factor when it comes to the quality of the wine, and you immediately stumble into 1,000 decisions, all of which cost money.
To improve concentration of flavour, it helps to reduce yields (which can be done by “green harvesting” – cutting off bunches of tiny green grapes in the summer); this has an obvious impact on vineyard economics. Older vines also tend to produce grapes that taste richer and more detailed, but they are often naturally lower yielding which, again, will ramp up cost.
Then there’s the matter of how much viticultural care you take. High-quality grapes are tended by hand as opposed to machine (add labour costs to the bill). There will be much agonising over the trellising system and the leaf-to-fruit ratio (this affects the quality of the fruit, and the canopy can be useful in shielding grapes from sunburn in hot places) and so on.
“We’ve worked out that we do 32 manual passes per pinot noir plant per year,” says Ruud Maasdam at Staete Landt in Marlborough, New Zealand. You can taste this care – and you can expect to pay about ￡16 a bottle for Maasdam’s deliciously silky pinot noir.
You may also need costly hail nets, an irrigation system…
Farm organically or biodynamically and there is even more work; possibly, arguably, also more risk to the crop. Picking by hand is gentler on the grapes but also more costly, particularly if you are so intent on getting the grapes at optimum ripeness that you send pickers on several tries through the vineyard or if the slope is so steep workers virtually have to abseil down it.
Reach the winery and you might want to sort the grapes up to three times, picking out rotten or unripe berries and bits of other vegetal matter. Inside the winery the scope for spending money with a view to improving quality – on presses, de-stemmers, temperature-controlled vats, those trendy concrete Nomblot egg-shaped tanks that cost about ￡2,500 a throw, bottling equipment and so on – is immense.
One ingredient that has a high impact on the cost of a sub-￡15 bottle is oak. Chips and staves (sticks of wood, essentially) might be added to a tank to give a taste of wood but their flavour tends to sit apart from the wine like an overlay, sometimes with a resinous or scratchy edge. Maturing a wine in barrel is a gentler process as it allows some aeration, producing a wine that tastes more civilised. For a price – a 225l oak barrel might cost ￡7 00. Let’s say it’s used three times; it will still add 78p to the cost of your bottle of wine.
Let’s not forget the closure either. “A screw cap costs us about 2 rand [16p],” one South African winemaker told me. “And a cork about 6 rand [49p], but you could easily pay up to 11 or 12 rand for a really top-quality cork.”
I could go on. I’ve barely scratched the surface; haven’t covered the cost of experimentation or the difficulty of working in a marginal climate (where better-quality wine grapes are grown) in which a producer may lose half or more of his crop in an unlucky vintage and so much more. But I hope this at least begins to answer Mr Keen’s question.让·克劳德·拉巴鲁酿造的博若莱红葡萄酒稠似血，味道浓郁，如旷野般奔放。虽然让·克劳德·拉巴鲁本人是一个谦逊的农民，可他却是当地的明星之一。一瓶博若莱洛丽红葡萄酒在商店的售价约二十几英镑。
几年前，我们俩坐在他酒厂外的一张旧桌子旁聊天。我问道：“为什么不多生产一些，这样不是能多挣点儿吗？搏若莱的地价比较低。你可以多买些地建葡萄园......”他无力地看着我，耸了耸肩，认为我的点子不切实际，并且说道：“现在的规模已经够累人了。我认为你的想法不可行。”
拉巴鲁是一个非常关注细节的人。他不仅只做一些组织管理工作，而且每个细节都会亲力亲为。他关心酒厂的电线和生物动力学。在酒厂里，他还使用黄金分割线来决定场地的长和宽，甚至连砖的尺寸也是如此。他将自己全部的心血倾注到纯手工葡萄酒中。正因为如此，拉巴鲁的葡萄酒才会比较贵。如果这些酒产自名气更大的区域，价格还要更高。即便如此，巴鲁的葡萄酒依然算是高价酒。
杰弗里·基恩是《每日邮报》的读者，他给我发邮件询问普通红酒（区别于时尚酒或收藏酒）的价格为什么各有不同，于是我便想起了让·克劳德·拉巴鲁。
“我能够理解小型葡萄园和历史悠久的葡萄园喜欢高价，”基恩先生写道，“种植场、代理商和销售商都需要分一杯羹，但是您能解释一下为什么有的酒一瓶只卖五英镑，而有的酒价格却是其五倍？”
接下来该如何解释呢？首先当然得从葡萄说起。你可以在比较肥沃的泥土中大量种植葡萄树，任由它们自行生长。种植地最好是在谷底。那里长出的葡萄虽不如山坡上结的果，但在谷底劳动更容易，因此成本也就更低。秋天来临，收割机一趟开过去便可收获了大量葡萄。收获后无需分类，将各种葡萄混在一起整体发酵。这就是生产便宜葡萄酒成本最低的方法。
一旦考虑葡萄的质量（影响葡萄酒质量的限制性因素），你立刻就会遇上一千个需要做出决定问题，所有的这些决定都将产生成本。
降低葡萄园的产量能够提高葡萄的芳香度。夏季，所谓的“青收”，即剪掉颗粒小的葡萄串，便可提高产量。这样做对葡萄园的经济效益影响很大。老葡萄树也会逐渐长出味道更加醇厚、口感更加细腻的葡萄，这种树的产量通常会自然下降，于是成本在一次上升。
还有就是葡萄生长时花的工夫。高质量的葡萄是人工而非机器管理的，这样一来又多了人工成本。葡萄架、叶果比例都会影响葡萄的质量，顶棚可以避免葡萄被太阳灼伤。这些事情以及其他管理工作都非常费工夫。
“我们统计过黑皮诺种植场每年有三十二项人工作业，”新西兰马尔堡大区斯泰特兰茨葡萄园的鲁德·马斯达姆说道。酒入口时，你能尝出融在酒里的工夫。花十六英镑，你就能买到一瓶马斯达姆酿造的口感如丝般柔滑的黑皮诺葡萄酒。
防冰雹网、灌溉系统等设施也很花钱。
葡萄园的管理和生态动力学的工作量更大，可能还会给葡萄带来更多的风险。手工摘葡萄会更轻柔，但成本也就更高。特别是如果你想在葡萄的成熟度最合适的时候进行采摘，那么你派出去的采葡萄工需要在葡萄园往返好几趟。如果山坡特别陡，采葡萄工几乎不得不沿山坡滑行。
采下来的葡萄送至酿酒厂后，你可能还要对进行葡萄分拣（分拣次数最多可达三次），将腐烂的、不成熟的或有其他问题葡萄剔出。为了提高葡萄酒的品质，酿酒厂需要在许多地方花钱，比如压榨机、去梗机、可调节温度的大桶、每个价值二千五百英镑的现代诺姆布罗蛋型混凝土发酵桶、装瓶器等等。
对每瓶价格十五英镑以下的红酒成本具有较大影响的因素还包括橡木。发酵桶或可以放入橡木片以使红酒产生橡木味，但是这种橡木味像涂层一样不融于酒，有时甚至还带有树脂般沙沙的感觉。酒的酿制是一个平缓的过程，期间需要通风，从而使酒的口感更加柔和。从价格上说，一只二百二十五升的橡木桶约七英镑。假设这只桶可酿三次酒，那么每瓶酒的成本就会多出七十八便士。
另外不要忽略封口。“螺旋瓶盖约两兰特（合十六便士）”一位南非的酿酒师告诉我说，“一只软木塞约六兰特（合四十九便士），而真正高档的软木塞价格达到十一、二兰特很正常。”
上述内容只是一些皮毛，我还可以继续写下去。实验的成本和葡萄生长所需的苛刻气候条件（如果收成不好，种植户可能会损失一半以上的收成）及诸如此类的东西还没有提到。但我希望这篇文章至少解决了基恩先生的部分困惑
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