“Lastly, every generation looks forward and back. Real old timers thought prices for 82 Bordeaux were crazy. 61 First Growths were $10 or less!”
Normally, it is true that we old farts remember everything as having been better. But, when 82 futures went on sale, the dollar bought 10 francs (twice the historical norm) and prices were cheap by any measure. Pichon Lalande when for $10 a bottle and I don’t think the first growths were more than $20 or $25 (I think; I didn’t buy them as I was then only a beginning assistant professor; for that matter, I never have). Considering that the inflation of the 70s and gone on between then and 61, the doubling in price would not have seemed like much. I believe the prices of the futures quickly went up, but the 83 futures costed about the same.
When I was buying and just drinking Chave and Allemand (1990s for Chave, early to mid 2000s for Allemand) they were both well under $100, so under $500 doesn’t make them somehow affordable.
Pricing is the biggest negative these days. There are still some “classically styled” Napa Cabs if one chooses carefully, but even with due care the wines are different because the climate has changed. Perception has changed as well. Given the stylistic modifications, vintages like 1998, 2000 and 2011 can hold some promise for fans of old school Cabernet wines.
It’s hard to think of myself as an “old timer,” but when I got into wine in the late 1980s (cheap wine exploration phase) and early to mid 1990s (onset of serious geekdom) the people who were 25 years older than me were pouring bottles of 1st growth Bordeaux that cost them $12-$15 on release. I was in my 30s, and they were in their late 50s, and I thought of them as the “old guys.” Well, I am in my mid 50s now, so yeah.
Lots more good wine to choose from these days. In terms of variety it’s an embarrassment of riches. The key is finding producers who make things that resonate with your taste preferences. Unfortunately there are not as many tasting opportunities (oh how I miss those Table & Vine tastings where for $30/person or so we got to taste 10-12 wines in a genre from modest to absolute top end - learned so much at those).
So from a world of choice standpoint it’s a huge net positive. Trying and regularly drinking the standard bearers is tough unless one decides to invest mortgage payments on a bottle or two. Not a choice I would make, as it would really annoy my wife. Harmony is more valuable than DRC.
The '82 Pichon-Lalande was generally $20+ when it hit the shelves. As I said above, I grabbed some when I found it at $19. I knew that was a steal. I think that was the winter of 84/85, though my records don’t include a date. Maybe on futures it was less than that, but I don’t think $10.
I bought '82 Mouton futures in late 1983 when they first went on sale for $37.50 (from Premier Cru, and they delivered!). As i recall, it was a tad higher than the other first growths because Parker had given it 100 by that point, I believe, or at least a record-high score for him at the time.
When the '82 futures went on sale in 1983, the franc was still around 8 to the dollar. It only hit 10 in 1995, when the '83s were coming in (chart). I would guess most '82 were imported closer to ~8FF=$1.
I’ll co-sign all of this (except #7 because I didn’t care about really the Loire, the Jura, the Languedoc, southern Italy, Mencia, or Ribero Sacra then and I don’t now – net zero).
Also, while I am sure there are loads of people who bought a ton of high end bdx and burgs in the 80s for a song, personally, I was dead-ass broke paying for law school at the time and a $40 bottle of Latour was nearly as out of reach for me then as a $800 bottle now. It is all relative.
It is a truism and a rather absurd over-generalization to say that the wines were less consistent back in the day, but it is a truism because it is largely true. A disappointing wine now is “not my style”; a disappointing wine then could have been wretch-inducing or liquid 30-grit.
Generally, I’d say that today is much better for consumers who aren’t label-conscious and just want something nice to drink with dinner.
Pichon Lalande 1982 futures were available at Sherry Lehman for $110 a case. Parker had initially low balled the score giving it I believe 93 points. FGs were all selling for $350 a case and Petrus was $600.
I stand corrected on the Pichon Lalande. I’m surprised at your $350/case figure for the first growths, but I see that I bought mine in March 1984, so perhaps they had risen a bit by then.
I’m an old timer, been collecting since late 1984. Within a few years I had moved from California to Bordeaux and Rhone, then to Burgundy where I’ve stayed collection-wise.
Beside price increase far beyond inflation—for example 1990 La Tâche was $233 a bottle and now is $4000 a bottle—availability was far better. Internet was just starting, wine-searcher didn’t exist, and stacks of DRC, Raveneau, and other such wines sat on the floor. Racks were full of Roumier and Ramonet, wines so easy to find by the case or more at many top stores.
Backfilling was tougher. You’d have to call stores, go there, or manually search through now-antiquated websites but would find stuff at great prices. Now when an older wine comes to market, merchants check wine-searcher and price accordingly, so the occasional steal is less common.
By 1999 releases, supplies had tightened some, DRC La Tâche up to $550 on release, still able to cobble together cases of desired wines. I got 3 cases of 99 Bachelet Charmes, 2 of Roumier Bonnes Mares, several of DRC. Now one is appreciative of single bottles at far higher prices.
As for quality, it’s now more uniform. There are more great wines. But the top wines aren’t significantly better.
In summary, there is more great wine, less quantity available, and it costs way more.
The irony is that there are far more “very good” wines available now and yet prices for the best wines are going through the roof. The good news is that you can still drink very well at most price points above $30, they just might not be Instagram-worthy wines.
All we get now is creamy stirring-of-the-lees fruit-hung-too-long too-thick too-gooey pH-too-high dreck.
I guess from the consumer’s point of view, it’s all good, since a $19.99 bottle of wine is now largely indistinguishable from a $1999.99 bottle of wine.
But I don’t know why anyone would want to swallow either one of them.
I feel like the last of the Old School farmers by trade - the guys with no more than an 8th-grade edumakashun, who honored the ancient family secrets - were probably born circa the late 1930s & early 1940s, and they started to retire in the early 2000s.
The great tragedy was that they foolishly sent their children off to get Bachelor’s & Master’s & PhDs in modern scientific oenology, with the result now in the 21st Century being a world flooded by veritable oceans of unswallowable wine.
PS: If any actual real world family winemakers stumble upon this thread, then kindly FORGET EVERYTHING YOU WERE TAUGHT IN SCHOOL and go back to using Grandpa’s recipe for making great wine. Thanks!!!
That happens to be the only DRC I’ve ever tasted, courtesy of our old friend Aris, who served it with breakfast as part of a weekend-long offline. Probably right about that time, too - he probably got a deal on it at S-L! No La Tâche with my scrambled eggs these days, alas.
Same for me, although I was making around $400-500 as a grad student when I first got more serious about wine. I did buy some second growths and the occasional Grand Cru Burgundy, though. Went to a lot of tastings because it was a more economical way to learn about wine regions and producers.
First, my credentials, because a lot of people upthread are not going to like what I have to say.
My 70th birthday was last Wednesday.
My first noteworthy and really good bottle of wine was a Beaujolais I was served at age 15 on the train from Lucerne to Paris in 1967.
My first ever first growth Bordeaux was at age 17 after my high school graduation ceremony in 1969, when I had a small glass of 1928 Ch. Margaux that a friend’s father had put away for him when he was born in 1951.
In the first luxury cuvée of wine I drank that I paid for was a bottle of Liebfraumich in November 1969 before the first ever Bo Schembechler/Woody Hayes football game in Ann Arbor. We considered is a luxury cuvée because it caused $0.25 more than Blue Nun.
My next struggle with wine pricing was in 1976, when I had to buy a great bottle of wine to bring to a friend’s house to celebrate the fact that we were all graduating from law school. I had a choice between the 1971 Ausone and the 1971 Yquem and I bought the Ausone because it was cheaper - $9 versus $11. It was a mistake because my friend served escargot tat she had been growing in a fish tank all year and what had only eaten garlic greens for that year. I think the Yquem would have been a better pairing but I didn’t know about pairings yet.
I bought my first ever first growth in about 1977. A 1973 Ch. Mouton that I still own because The Count elected not to drink it at my house a few months ago.
That said, I really do not need to read most of the comments above (I read a few just to confirm) because everyone wants to complain about Parkerization and spoofing because the Devil came out of the volcanic eruption of Mount Ruiz in Columbia, South America, in 1985 and ruined winemaking for everyone except the cognoscenti. That, IMNSHO, is complete and utter bullshit.
I have no doubt that the average quality of wine available today is light-years ahead of what I could buy in the 1970s. The fact that the 1945 Port that I had in 1981 was better than the 1994 Port that I had in 2017 relates only to the fact that the latter was 23 years old while the former was 36 years old. I have 2 bottles of the 1994 left and if I make it to 2030, I expect that the 1994 will be just as good or better. No way will I make it to 2060, but if I leave the last bottle to my grandson, it will certainly be better than the 1955 Cockburn I had this summer.
I cannot fathom why everyone seems to think that every human endeavor, from running the 100 meter dash to designing safe automobiles to eradicating disease as a result of scientific advancement, is better today than it was 50 years ago, except winemaking. Did humans all of a sudden get stupid when it comes to winemaking? What we really have here in this site is a large, inbred gene pool that draws its knowledge from other people in the same pool. I frequently drink wine with “normal people.” I also refuse to serve them wine that I consider to be inferior and thus save the “really good stuff” for the “experts.” I regularly get responses like “Wow, this is great,” or “This is the best wine I ever had” when I serve things like Saxum or SQN to them. Wake up and smell the Surströmming. It is not good and we do not need to use inferior processes from the dark ages. Let’s put the Wineberserkers version of Hipsterism in the grave forever.
As I said, I didn’t buy first growths–or anything else at that point, given what I was paid. But I had older colleagues who sprung for some super seconds so I did hear about the 82 first tranche future prices. Given that Parker was known in DC, the reviews were high and the prices were low, this was the only time in their lives these colleagues bought any bordeaux higher than the lowest cru bourgeois brought in by Calvert Woodley or Macarthur’s. I understand that those prices went up quickly on the second tranche and when they hit the shelves.
I didn’t spring for those wines at the time, either, with exceptions. The most notable were an offline at Campanile in the mid- to late '90s when we went in on '78 Chave at (IIRC) $175 and one at Keen’s in the same time frame where we went in on a similarly-priced aged Yquem (1976, I think), plus a couple of splurges at retail, some of which I haven’t opened yet. But the point is that had I wanted to to so, I COULD have splurged for a bottle of Petrus, a bottle of Monfortino, a bottle of La Tâche, a bottle of Rayas, a bottle of Unico, a bottle of Yquem, and another handful of similar bottles, had I wanted to (either by myself or with a group), and if I’d known what was coming with the separation of those prices from the rest of the pack, I WOULD have. Someone with a similar income relative to inflation as mine was in the mid-'90s could not do that today no matter what’s coming and no matter whether he or she wants to, at least not without being grossly financially irresponsible. They may still be able to reach one bottle of one or two of those or similar wines today, but achieving the broad spectrum of tasting something approaching a complete set of the consensus benchmark greats is no longer a thing for those not able to play at the very upper end of the “luxury good” market.