Oh, poor Barolista -- must you go thirsty?

I can still remember the first time I ever tasted a Barolo. It was 23 years ago, and I was relatively new to wine so I didn’t have much frame of reference, but from the first sip -- the first sniff, really -- of that 1971 Luigi Einaudi Barolo, I knew I’d encountered something truly extraordinary.

I felt as if I were simultaneously tasting and smelling roses, chocolate, chestnuts, wood smoke and maybe even violets. Best of all, the wine perfectly complemented what we were eating. I was equally impressed when I tried Barolo from other vintages and other producers, so I started buying a little Barolo for my cellar in every good vintage. I became what the Piemontese call a Barolista -- a Barolo lover.

But I knew I was in trouble late last year when Wine Spectator published a cover story proclaiming the 2000 vintage in Piemonte “perfect,” worth 100 points -- the first vintage anywhere in the world ever to have won that Spectator accolade. Since critics’ scores drive prices up, I immediately worried that with a perfect score, 2000 Barolos -- the correct Italian plural is “Baroli” -- would instantly be priced beyond my reach.

As it turned out, a series of unhappy circumstances conspired to do just that.

I was particularly concerned about the Spectator rating because the 2000 vintage is the first in which Giorgio Rivetti, one of my favorite Piemontese winemakers, made a Barolo. Indeed, I was thrilled early last summer when the first e-mail I received from any wine store on any 2000 Barolo was an offer by the Wine Club in Santa Ana of Rivetti’s 2000 Barolo Campe. At least I was thrilled until I saw the price: $80 a bottle.

I used to be able to buy Barolo -- not top of the line but still very good -- for $30 to $45. Even though prices had increased considerably in the last two or three vintages, I’d hoped to be able to buy a bottle or two of Rivetti’s Barolo for $50 or $60 apiece. At $80, it was out of my price range.

I began looking at prices for Baroli by other producers whose wines I’d liked in previous vintages. The first few I checked were also beyond my budget -- especially at a time when I found myself unexpectedly strapped for cash. Reluctantly -- grumpily -- I decided that I’d have to pass on the 2000 vintage.

At first I was annoyed with Wine Spectator. It was irrational, I know, but I blamed “them” for depriving me of “my” Barolo. How dare they! I know people at Spectator, and I felt as if they’d betrayed me, much as I felt when Peter O’Malley sold the Dodgers to Rupert Murdoch.

Then I did some homework. What I found surprised me.

The most important factor in the increase in prices for 2000 Barolo was not Spectator’s 100-point rating but the slide of the dollar versus the euro -- a drop of almost 25% in the last year (and almost 40% since 2001).

At that point, I became annoyed at myself. There were highly rated Baroli at many price points, and if I’d shopped more thoroughly and more carefully, I probably could have found a few in my price range before the Spectator ratings had affected prices.

Most wholesalers and retailers had placed their orders for 2000 Barolo through their regular channels months before the Spectator ratings came out, so their original prices -- while driven up by inflation and the slide of the dollar -- actually weren’t as staggering as they might otherwise have been.

But consumer demand soared in response to those ratings, especially among customers new to Barolo.

“Clients who have never bought Barolo from us in the past 20 years came out of the woodwork and said, ‘Can I get a case of this and a case of that,’ ” says Rand Yazzolino, president of Estate Wines Ltd., which imports many of the best Baroli.

When early supplies sold out and the value of the dollar continued to fall, many wholesalers and retailers had to make a decision: Should they pay more to buy more on the gray market -- largely unauthorized sources who pay producers a premium for scarce and/or highly rated wines, then resell them at a profit?

Anyone who buys on the gray market has to pass along those higher prices to his customers to maintain profit margins. If customers balk at the higher prices, the retailer (or wholesaler) is stuck with a lot of wine.

That’s when Barolo prices really began to take off.

“We took a little 2000 Barolo on the gray market but not much,” says Kyle Meyer of the Wine Exchange in Orange. “The Spectator touted Giacomo Grimaldi’s wines so much [two of his Baroli were rated at 96] that when we wanted to get more, prices were up 40% to 50%, sometimes double, if you could even find the wines.”

Although some 2000 Baroli still sell for about the same price as the 1999 vintage, most 2000s that I checked personally or asked retailers about are up from 10% to 40% over ‘99s, depending on the individual wine and when and where you buy it.

Grade inflation

Curiously, about the time I was kicking myself for prematurely bypassing the vintage, I began to hear reports that it wasn’t really as good as Spectator said after all.

“The wines are good, but the score is just way too high,” says Piero Selvaggio, whose wine list at Valentino contains a dozen pages of Barolo. “No way it’s a 100-point vintage. No way it’s better than ’96 or ’99.”

Kyle Smith, general manager of Woodland Hills Wine, says that when he tasted the 2000 Baroli in Italy early last year, “I thought 2000 was maybe the fourth or fifth best vintage of the last six. It’s definitely not better than 1996, ’99 or the 2001 (which will be released early next year), and it’s about on a level with the ’97. I was shocked by the Spectator’s overzealous ratings. It’s been a running joke among serious Barolo collectors.”

Steve Tanzer writes in his International Wine Cellar that when he visited Barolo in September, no producer rated the 2000 vintage as the best of the 1996-2001 string of excellent vintages, “and several purists place it well back in the pack.”

In fact, several wine retailers I spoke with said the Barolo market had been saturated with the high-quality 1996-1999 vintages, and that actually had kept prices for the 2000 Baroli from going through the roof after the Spectator rating came out.

“There are fewer people who drink Barolo than Cabernet or Bordeaux,” says Christian Navarro of Wally’s in Westwood. “They’re like a cult, and with all these terrific vintages in a row, their cellars are full. They were buying cases of the ’96 and ‘97, but they’re only buying bottles of the 2000.”

My cellar was also full, but I wasn’t even buying bottles of the 2000.

Still, several local retailers told me they sold three to five times more 2000 Barolo than they’d sold of the ‘99, and all said that -- thanks to Spectator -- they could have sold even more if they’d bought more.

The more I heard, the more I resented not having any 2000 Barolo. Suppose they aged well and became great wines? I’d feel really silly with that big “hole” in my cellar: Baroli from 1971, ‘78, ‘82, ‘88, ‘89, ‘90, ‘95, ‘96, ‘97, ‘98, ’99 -- but no 2000? What kind of Barolista was I anyway? I like to say that I’m probably the only non-Italian in California who has 10 times more Barolo than Cabernet Sauvignon in his cellar. But no 2000?

Then, early this month, at the small Barolo/cigar/white truffle lunch I organize every year, friends who heard me complaining took pity on me and passed the hat (actually, it was a bread basket), taking up a small collection for me to finance a modest 2000 Barolo purchase.

Embarrassed but grateful -- and with more than $100 in “found” money in my pocket -- I immediately renewed my research. My first question: Should I really splurge and buy the Rivetti?

Hah!

By now Spectator had given it 98 points -- making it one of 38 Baroli to earn 95 points or more in that vintage. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that the earlier, extravagantly high price of $80 now looked like a bargain. Prices around town now range from $96 to $136.

Great. No Rivetti for me.

But I added some of my money (and The Times’ money) to my friends’ contributions, and I bought a few other bottles, ranging in price from $40 to $70. Virtually trembling with curiosity and anticipation, I raided my cellar and tasted them alongside ’96 and ’99 Baroli from the same producers.

I liked them all. But in each case, I preferred the older vintages. They have the balance, finesse, depth and classic structure that originally led me to fall in love with Barolo.

This isn’t entirely fair, but I found myself thinking that it was like comparing great red Burgundy (the only wine I like even better than Barolo) to some overripe California Pinots.

The 2000 Baroli are very forward, fruity, easy drinking, early maturing; many are made in the new, international style that has become popular over the last 20 or 25 years.

Before then, Barolo makers macerated their Nebbiolo grape juice for several weeks during the fermentation process, then aged it in large Yugoslavian oak barrels. That process produced wines so powerful and tannic that they couldn’t be drunk for a decade or two (or longer), after which they could last two or three decades (or longer).

The new-style Barolo makers macerate their juice for only a few days and then age the wine in small French oak barrels. This yields wines that are more accessible at an earlier age, with lush fruit and softer tannins.

Americans in particular -- a notoriously impatient and sweet-toothed lot -- like these “soft, perfumed wines,” as Bibenda, the magazine published by the association of Italian sommeliers, put it in a recent issue, and it’s Americans (and American critics) who drive the global wine market.

“The 2000 vintage was an anomaly, a vintage made in the style that

Yazzolino thinks the early accessibility of the 2000 Baroli, combined with Spectator’s perfect rating and the wide availability of wines with high scores at many price points, could “put Piedmont on the map for the general populace, not just collectors and Barolistas.”

As someone who believes in sharing and spreading life’s pleasures, I’m happy to hear that. But after all my anguish and all my research, I think I’m going to save most of my Barolo bucks for the 2001s -- and hope the dollar makes a comeback.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.