In a recent post entitled “Wine Bling vs Dollars” I attempted to answer the question: does it cost more to make good wine as opposed to bad wine? The answer is generally, yes, but with a lot of qualifying considerations. As a follow-up to that post, the question now becomes: at what point does a connoisseur of wine begin to experience diminishing returns when measuring wine cost against wine quality? Is there a price point after which we no longer receive an increase in the quality of wine?
 
While we venture through this subject together, keep in mind that one of the major criticisms many experts have with our current wine rating system is that there is a finite scale, one which cannot be exceeded. In other words when using a 100 point scale to rate wine, no wine can ever, ever, be better than that - 100 is the very best it can be. But what happens if we discovered a wine that was better than other similar 100 point wines? What then? Do we give it a 100 +? Or do we give it a 110? The scale itself doesn’t matter, whether we use a 100 point system or a 20 point system or any other system, all are limited and logically do not bode well when attempting to determine diminishing returns.

Let’s use First Growth Bordeaux as an example. Wine Spectator rated Château Latour, 2000 at 100 points (best to drink after 2012) and any of us can buy this wine for $750 per bottle. Wine Spectator also rated the 1990 Château Latour at 100 points (best after 2008), which can be purchased for around $400 plus or minus. Going back to the question: at what point do we realize diminishing returns? Undoubtedly these two wines side-by-side will exhibit different characteristics due to different vintages but if both were drinkable today (you still need to wait on the 2000 for a few more years before drinking it), I think either one of them would be truly remarkable wines. Château Latour is considered one of the ‘best’ of only a handful of great wine estates in the world.

As it stands at the moment, you could buy almost two bottles of the1990 for the price of one bottle of the ‘00 vintage. Is the 2000 really better? I don’t believe so but given a decade of inflation and rising production costs, the 2000 is logically going to cost more money on release because it certainly cost more to produce. Besides, I would buy the 1990 because it is drinkable today and for many years to come, at least until 2030 or 2040.

Let’s take this a step further and add in the 1961 Latour to the mix. This little sweetheart, also rated 100 points by Wine Spectator will drain $3000 to $5000 dollars out of your wine purchasing account. Can it really be thousands of dollars better than the 1990 or 2000? According to the scale, no, and I would hazard to guess according to taste, also no. I have not lined up these three particular vintages of Latour myself to be able to exclaim unequivocally that there are major differences and the price difference is worth the thousands to experience the ’61 so I could be wrong but really, how much better can a wine be?

Let us also not forget that:

(a) wine has a diminishing life all by itself, whether we consume it or whether it just fades beyond drinkability with age, it will eventually no longer be available or drinkable, and in either case makes it more valuable if it was great to begin with; and,

(b) there are some vintages that are just plain famous, such as Bordeaux 1961, that people will pay more for because the wines from this vintage were widely regarded as being amazing. Vintage matters a great deal but famous vintages, not so much. A highly regarded vintage only means that more estates were able to achieve better results than in average or difficult vintages. If you’re buying fine wine, so what? It just doesn’t matter that a lesser wine estate finally was able to produce a good wine because the weather happened to be favorable that year.

In the case of 1961 and 2000, they were indeed considered great vintages (by the way, 1990 was not shabby either) but neither vintage will make a 100 point wine taste better. So part of what we pay for is reputation of the vintage, and the other part is rarity.

Even though the ratings we use to measure the quality of wine has its limits, so too does wine. Wine cannot infinitely be better although I would say that our perceptions about what is good wine has changed and evolved over the course of centuries. What might have been considered good wine 300 years ago might be considered Drano (or worse) today.

The bottom line is this: it is my opinion that if you are buying wine that costs more than $800 per bottle, you are either drinking very rare wine (which doesn’t always just mean old wine but also includes current and recent vintages from producers like Burgundy's Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Château Petrus located on the Right Bank of Bordeaux ), which can be a legitimate reason to spend more, or you have been seduced into believing the fairy-tale that paying more for wine means it is actually better wine. With the exception of rare wines, paying anything beyond $800 is strictly no longer about quality wine but perhaps more about showmanship or bragging rights, which I suppose also has its place at times. So with the exception of a few very low production/high demand wines, you should be able to drink the very best wines in the world for under $800 per bottle – a small price to pay for such extreme pleasure

David Boyer