You will often see producers refer to yields on a back label of a bottle or sometimes a writer will refer to the low yields of a particular producer. "Yield" refers to the amount of wine produced in relationship to the plot of land that it is grown on. You undoubtedly have noticed how the price of the wine goes up as that yield number goes down. What does yield have to do with anything? Here is a very brief, very non-comprehensive explanation.

Usually, you will see a reference to yields expressed like this: In Bandol (Provence) the maximum allowed yield is 40 hectoliters of wine per hectare. That translates to approximately 2.3 tons of grapes per acre, which means they can make about 138 cases of wine from an acre of vines at that yield.

Yields like this are considered low. Generally, lower yields produce higher quality wines because the higher the yield, the more diluted the wine will be. Lower yields lead to higher costs and more expensive wine. Most fine wine producers concentrate on lower yields. As a comparison, most medium quality California vineyards produce higher yields of about 3 to 6 tons of grapes per acre compared to Bandol's 2.3.

The connection between low yields and high-quality wine has been known since Roman times. Usually, heavily cropped vines (vines that produce a lot of fruit) are slower to ripen, so sometimes in a cooler climate the fruit may not reach full ripeness. When this happens, wine quality suffers. What is less widely known is that under cropping (getting too low a yield) can also negatively affect wine quality.

What you need to remember about yields is this: Generally, the lower the yield the better the chances are that the wine you are about to drink is going to be of higher quality. But don't get totally sucked into this low yield hype (which is a lot like the ripeness hype). For example, some of the finest red Bordeaux vintage years of the 1980s were also those in which yields were relatively high; while the lowest crop levels of the decade were recorded in lesser vintages such as 1984 and 1980.

Just what level of yield a vineyard can ripen properly depends on the vine variety, the region, vineyard management, climate and weather. Low yields are often used as a marketing tool and this seems especially true of wines from the New World and wines made in an "international" style. Remember to keep the marketing separate from the product when you are buying wine. Lots of merely adequate wines have great marketing. But great marketing never makes a great wine.

In conclusion, if you are really smart about wine, you can forget about the preceding paragraphs and just buy what we recommend. Guy du Vin does the work for you, and you can just give us your hard earned dollars and reap the benefits. Have we told you lately how much we like your money? And you too, of course! By the way, have we told you how great you are looking these days? Have you lost some weight? We really admire your work...