If you have been buying and drinking wine over the course of even a few years, you realize the importance of a wine’s vintage unless you drink only ‘grocery store’ wines. I consider a grocery store wine as a mass-produced, non-vineyard-specific, and sometimes non-varietal-specific wine that has no character or hint of terroir left in it by the time it hits your glass. These are most often very inexpensive wines using grapes sourced from huge vineyards where almost everything is automated in the vineyard and winemaking process with the goal of selling hundreds of thousands or even millions of cases each year.

I’m not slamming grocery stores and in the past couple of years many grocery stores have begun to sell better wine and even a limited selection of fine wine in some instances.  But Yellow Tail is a good example of a grocery store wine, where vintage doesn’t matter much because the wine was produced to pretty much taste the same from year to year and to be drunk upon release. On the lower end of the scale vintage does not have much, if any, effect on wine.

Vintage for fine wine is indeed a big deal however and all other things being equal, (like a great winemaker didn’t quit and go somewhere else or the winery didn’t stop buying French oak for Hungarian oak, etc) it comes down to what Mother Nature dished out in any specific year. Rainfall, sunshine, coolness, warmth, humidity, wind, pests, storms, disease and much more all have potentially profound effects on the eventual outcome of any given wine. That’s a lot of factors that can and certainly do vary from year to year in the growing and harvest seasons from one year to the next. Even just a good rainfall at harvest or right before harvest can have devastating effects on that year’s production: imagine all of those vines soaking up every drop of rain, thereby diluting the fruit concentration in the grape with water! Unless the wine is made in a region that permits human intervention like using reverse osmosis to remove excess water from the must (must is the grape juice used to ferment into wine after crushing and pressing the grapes), a whole vintage can be ruined by just one event like this.

There is an enormous amount of fuss over vintages and a lot of speculation and hype that can drive prices through the roof. In Bordeaux for example, look at what is considered the best vintages in the past hundred years or so: 1929, 1945, 1961, 1982, 1989, 2000, 2003, 2005 and now the 2009 vintage which is barely into barrels is being hyped as the greatest vintage since the birth of Christ. What does all of this really mean though? Why is a vintage great and what are the upsides and downsides of a great vintage?

A great vintage only means that the growing conditions throughout the season were optimal and there is a high likelihood of nearly every estate producing a generally higher quality of wine for that given year. But it doesn’t mean that a 95 point wine from a great vintage is going to be any better than a 95 point wine from a difficult or disastrous vintage. It means that a winery that typically produces a 92 or 93 point wine, could produce a 95 point wine or a 98 point wine in a great vintage. Does this really do anything for you or me? You bet it does! It means we’ll pay more for the exact same bottle we bought last vintage. Maybe it will be better or maybe not but we’ll pay more for the ‘great vintage’.

This really only matters if you are a speculator and buy wine for investment purposes. If this is your thing then stick to the great vintages from whatever region you’re buying and, in a stable economy, buy as early as possible in most cases. All bets are off in times like this though – buying wine futures, especially these days is very risky, like the ‘great 2005’ vintage; many of those investing in 2005 Bordeaux futures lost as much as half their investment as the economy turned south. If you are a wine drinker on the other hand, forget about great vintages and buy good or great wine to enjoy. Even ‘off vintages’ produce very good wine from someone and the prices are far less than those from so-called great vintages.

The downside of great vintages is that wine critics routinely revisit them and things do not always turn out the way we (or they) originally thought they would. Right now for example, everyone is drinking the fab ’82 vintage of Bordeaux but critics are wondering if they made the right call on all the wine they rated back then because scores are changing quickly in many cases. Many châteaux thought to have produced incredible wine in 1989 are being eclipsed by the 1990 vintage and sometimes even the 1988 vintage. And some First Growth Bordeaux, like Château Latour didn’t fare well in the ’89 vintage to begin with. These are only a few of numerous examples of so-called great vintages being eventually thrown under the bus. All I’m trying to get across is that great vintages are only hype, they drive the market upwards, and are only important to speculators. Great wine is great wine in any vintage.

Drink good wine. Drink great wine. It does not have to come from a celebrity vintage to be great. I have had many bottles of ‘off-vintage’ Bordeaux that were truly wonderful but had no status in the world of wine. I know - it’s kind of like buying stuff from Off 5^th instead of Saks 5^th Avenue but put great wine in a glass while the bottle remains in a plain brown paper bag and you will dazzle your guests – even the most experienced collector.

David Boyer

Photo by the truly great, but late, DB III