Bernard-Bonin, Alvina Pernot, Joseph Colin, just to name a few fairly new names in the small world of Burgundy—all with offers that are priced as high or higher than established names. I even saw a Folatieres from a name I didn’t recognize at $120 a bottle. Don’t you have to earn your stripes these days? Just grumbling . . .
Where does Domaine d’Eugenie fit into the continuum? Pretty pricey wines.
Picked up a couple at auction well under wholesale, so maybe the price is not holding up here.
Auction is far cheaper than retail channels here. Personally, I don’t think they have figured out their oak regime. Some I’ve had have been very nice, while others were like sucking on charred lumber.
previously, the reputation of the producer was responsible for garnering the price. then, a connection to a famous producer also garnered a better price. next merely the vineyard, or even proximity to a good one was enough to charge a little extra. but now even a minor grape associated with burgundy is good enough of a marketing ploy; i present you with the $40 aligote from mexico
I think the problem here is that people are still fixated on appellations. The mentality is very hard to escape. Even when a village wine is brilliant people will say it’s “premier cru quality”, and when a wine from the Mâconnais stuns, people say “it’s as good as Puligny”. In fact, while some sites are obviously better than others for growing grapes, and while some places such as Musigny and Montrachet do tend to produce truly special wines in the right hands, in my view these appellation hierarchies are strongly reinforced rather than merely revealed. But fixating on the hierarchy of appellations focusses demand on the highest-classified 1% of vineyard land, meaning prices for wines from those sites, no matter the quality, will always be high. In turn, it also imposes glass ceilings on so-called “lesser” appellations, dimming ambition and encouraging producers to aim for quantity rather than quality.
Yet the results from meticulous viticulture and winemaking, wherever it is applied, speak for themselves. Wines from producers such as Dureuil-Janthial are still affordable, and if you drink a glass of his 2017 Rully Meix Cadot Vieilles Vignes you would not know you are drinking a “lesser” appellation. The challenge is to abstract wines such as these from a discourse dominated by the concept of “value” (and the implication that they’re merely good for the price but that one can do better by paying more) and instead to recognize them as great wines in their own terms that happily happen to be keenly priced. My personal buying philosophy is all about the best producers and not at all about appellation: I buy a lot of Dureuil-Janthial, Guffens-Heynen, Bruno Lorenzon, Domaine de la Bongran in southern Burgundy; in the Côte de Beaune, I buy Coche-Dury, Bernard Moreau, Lamy, Lamy-Caillat. I have no interest in buying a “good Meursault for the price” from a producer whose farming and winemaking are not on the level of the region’s best but who happens to be blessed with a parcel of vines that boast a famous post code.
Pricing of luxury items is a fascinating topic to me. There is often no connection between price, quality, and pricing. I always find it funny how a producer can be an unknown for years witH incredible product that won’t sell because they are not “known”. Then something happens and they get attention and the same stuff sell out at 3X the price. And then what often happens in the jewelry world, is the same producer has to outsource to keep up, quality drops (as does production cost) while price stays the same or rises as more people want a piece.
Many years ago, we learned that if one prices a piece too low it won’t sell. Many people see low price as an indication of poor quality because they don’t know how else to tell. We raised prices and sales increased. There is a term for this but I don’t remember it.
Portugal’s most famous red table wine, Barca Velha, is purely a brand. It is the exact same wine as the Ferreirinha Reserva Especial, but only declared to be Barca Velha in supposedly exceptional years (the last one was 2008). The criteria of choice is necessarily subjective, and many people felt, for instance, that the 2007 Reserva Especial was more deserving of the Barca Velha title than the 2008 (currently it’s actually easier to find 2008 Barca Velha for sale). But what’s done is done, and whereas a Reserva Especial sells for 250€, Barca Velha sells for +600€. Go figure. It’s called premium pricing, and the 12 Angry Men who got repeatedly duped clearly fell prey to that.