Still Much Hype Over the Quality of Burgundies

Any wine lover who has tasted a sip of a great red or white Burgundy swoons at the thought of repeating the act.

There is little like it--the sublime spice and richness of the Chardonnay, the intense decadence of clove-scented cherries in the Pinot Noir. This is the essence of great Burgundy and it’s what makes these wines so desirable and so elusive.

And yet it is with great sadness that I report my own disenchantment with Burgundy in the last decade. I know it can be great wine. I know it can offer some of the greatest and most expansive flavors and tastes the human body can grasp. And yet more and more I come away from tastings of young Burgundies with a growing feeling that there is a tad of prestidigitation going on here.

No, it is not fraud. No one is intentionally putting anything over on us. It’s just that after all the hype I have heard for some of the latest vintages of French Burgundy, I have been expecting nirvana-like exploitation of my palate. And what I have seen, in recent tastings, is some merely exceptionally good wine.

I’m not angry about this, just wistfully sad that what I anticipate from Burgundy is rarely what I get. This is not true of Bordeaux. I had heard of the greatness of the 1986 Bordeaux and I tasted anticipating greatness. By and large, I got it.

It reminded me of my feeling about the pre-Super Bowl hype, people talking about the greatness of Joe Montana and Jerry Rice. I knew there was a chance both would flop in the Big Game, just as I knew the hype for the ’86 Bordeaux might be overstating the case. But right on schedule, the ‘49ers and the ’86 Bordeaux both delivered.

Burgundy? Well, that’s another story. I have been mildly disappointed with what I have seen in the last few years. The wines are good to excellent, no question about it, but a lot of them lack a certain je ne sais quoi and leave me asking “Is that all there is?”

Then comes the second half of my disappointment, which is best left for the tag line to the following story:

Jean-Francois Bouchard came to town the other day to show off some of the acclaimed 1989 Burgundies.

Among the four white wines he poured was one I found wonderful--1989 Bouchard Chevalier-Montrachet, which has a magnificent textured aroma of earth/chalk, spice nuances and oak tones. It is rich and mouth-filling; and though it didn’t remind me as much of a Chevalier-Montrachet as a Meursault with a trace of Chablis, it is appealing and rewarding.

I didn’t know the price of the wine while evaluating it; I guessed it would be expensive, perhaps $50 to $75 a bottle.

The press kit said suggested retail is $91. A bottle.

What’s going on here, of course, is high worldwide demand for a product that is always in short supply. Not every Burgundy is this high in price, of course, but demand for all Burgundy is so high that virtually everything is priced higher than it ought to be based on quality alone, and too expensive for me to recommend for all but defrocked Wall Street brokers.

Now, I may be accused of having the dreaded California Palate, but a lot of what I tasted in the last few weeks of French Burgundy reminded me of the better California Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs, which sell for a fraction of the price. Examples abound.

--A lovely Beaune I had at a tasting recently that retails for $30 a bottle reminded me of the Pinot Noir from Saintsbury in the Napa Valley--reminding me also of Saintsbury’s wonderful slogan “Beaune in the U.S.A.”

--The ’89 Chevalier-Montrachet mentioned above was superb, but I asked myself if it was that much better than the wines of Kistler or Chalone or Hanzell or Kalin or Sanford or Sterling or Ferrari-Carano or Babcock or Flora Springs--wines that run less than a third of the price of the Bouchard wine.

Red Burgundy causes a weakening of connoisseurs’ knees, and the debate these days is not high pricing but merely whether 1988 or 1989 is a greater vintage. (It’s fortunate for the French that they have this “problem” to deal with rather than the real question of high price.)

Dale Sharp, wine buyer for Red Carpet Wine & Spirits in Glendale, thinks the debate is a chance for buyers to find the excellent and “well priced” 1987s, which he said are “very good and may get lost in the rush to get the ‘88s and ‘89s.” Yet that phrase “well-priced” is only relative; the wines are still mighty dear.

Sharp said the French may be trying to recoup for a number of mediocre vintages. He said 1985 was a great year in Burgundy, but, “You have to go all the way back to ’78 before you get to a substantial vintage,” said Sharp, so the French may be trying to recoup a bit after lower prices in the years 1979 through 1984.

He noted that after the high prices for the ‘85s, prices for the hard 1986s dropped only 10%. “That means that the ‘86s were too high,” he said.

Mike Lynch, wine buyer for Pacific Wine Co. in San Francisco, joked about high prices for Burgundy: “We do a direct deposit with a lot of our customers. They send us their paychecks, we send them Burgundy.”

Dave Breitstein of the Duke of Bourbon in Canoga Park said: “I can’t keep up with the French Burgundies because the prices are simply too high. I used to sell a lot of them when they were priced between $20 and $35. Now most of these wines are priced between $40 and $100 and our customers are not in the mood to spend these kinds of prices.”

He said today’s high prices for Burgundy are a result of short supply, to be sure, but also due to a four-tier marketing system--one tier more than the traditional three-tier system of the past.

“This fourth tier is the national marketing company,” said Breitstein. “For instance, Joseph Drouhin is being represented by Dreyfus Ashby. So you have the exporter, the importer, the marketing company and the wholesaler between us and the wine, and that means that a wine that’s $10 FOB becomes $40 by the time it gets to the retail shelf.”

Sharp added, “The Japanese yen is so strong against the other currencies of the world, and the Japanese have all this extra disposable income and they are having a major impact on the supply of wines, to the detriment of the American consumer. They’re buying wines that they never did ten years ago.”

Steve Wallace of Wally’s in West Los Angeles sells a great deal of Burgundy, but he’s nervous about the prices he must charge.

“I’ve taken a pretty strong position in ’88 red Burgundies, and I’m concerned because the gamble is on the retailer,” said Wallace. “The (West Coast) wholesaler will not take a strong position unless he pre-sells the wine. But on the East Coast, the wholesaler will take a position by keeping inventories in stock, and you can find the ‘hot’ wines after the first few weeks.

“Burgundy is a real gamble. You never know what they’re going to taste like, and even after you taste them you don’t know what’s going to happen in the bottle.”

Sharp said, additionally, that prices for French Burgundies are lower on the East Coast than they are in the West: “My biggest complaint as a retailer is that I get newsletters from (wine shops) in the east and they get stuff and sell them for prices we can’t even buy the wines for,” said Sharp.

Wallace said the East Coast is a better and thus more competitive Burgundy market “because it was there first and people understand it better. Our lack of experience has hurt our knowledge of it, and that hurts the price.”

I asked Wallace what he thought about lower prices for French Burgundies (and Bordeaux) on the East Coast.

“I get real irritated when I see that. I asked Ab Simon (president of Seagram’s Chateau and Estate division) why I pay more for the same wines than they do in the east, and he said he had to be more competitive back there.

“But the real reason is that they can deal pretty much directly with the retailers, and here we have another 25% markup--the wholesaler. Some of my potential buyers are actually buying wine back east and shipping it out here--even though it’s illegal to do that.”

Some small Burgundy producers do not deal through a major national house and thus prices for them are more consistent from coast to coast.

Lynch of Pacific Wine Co. estimated that about 30% of the good Burgundies sell in California and New York at the same (or similar) prices.

“But any of the national items, like stuff from Kobrand and Chateau and Estate, seems to be cheaper on the East Coast,” said Lynch, “so we don’t have much of that stuff in our inventory.”

A number of merchants interviewed said smaller wholesale houses such as Grape Expectations of Emeryville, Kermit Lynch of Berkeley and Martine Saunier of San Rafael do a marvelous job of importing fine Burgundies and keeping prices relatively reasonable. Martine’s catalogue, in particular, shows a number of wines from respected wine makers at prices 10% to 20% lower than major-house wines from the same French districts.

The difference is that some of these producers are not well known.

Lynch said West Coast merchants face another problem in marketing Burgundy: supply. “Chateau and Estate makes sure their buddies on the East Coast get first pick. Their allocations are bigger than ours,” said Lynch.

He added that retailers who take a strong position in a wine are risking a lot. “We are at the mercy of the wine press, because if they are lukewarm to a vintage and you have taken a position in it, well, when you’re talking about wines that are $30 to $40 a bottle and you can’t sell them. . . .

Breitstein of Duke of Bourbon noted too that because of a greater competition and a greater volume of sales in major East Coast cities, many shops in the East buy huge amounts of wine at a time, getting a bigger discount.

“There is almost no store in L.A. that’s buying a container-load of wine to get a lower price, but every major store in New York is buying container-loads of wine,” said Breitstein. “Our store is selling about 50% more wine this year than two years ago, yet we’re selling virtually no Burgundy and two years ago it represented 20% of our business.”

Breitstein added, “The wine business is healthy, but if the producers and suppliers are not careful, they will lose certain segments of the market.”

On the other hand, Sharp pointed out that some buyers are always optimistic about Burgundy: “I’m a Burgundy fanatic and I’ve been disappointed more times than I have been excited,” said Sharp. “but the times I’ve been pleased make up for all the times I’ve been disappointed.”

A final word on the French Burgundies. At the Bouchard tasting the other day, I sat with a man who was chatting about the greatness of a new California Chardonnay. He raved about the superb qualities of the wine and said it was magnificent.

Then he said, “Unfortunately, they are charging a lot for it--$24.”

I replied, “But you don’t think $91 is too much for Chevalier-Montrachet?”

He replied, “Oh, but that’s Burgundy.”

Wine of the Week: 1988 Jaboulet St. Joseph ($15)--At a tasting of Burgundies a week ago, I sampled the line of Rhone wines from Jaboulet. Every wine was not only well made but well priced, and this Hermitage-like red wine is deep, richly fruity and brawny enough to mature nicely in a cellar. But it also is so appealing now it can be enjoyed immediately. A merchant at the tasting complained that St. Joseph had risen in price too fast. “I remember when I could sell St. Joseph for eight bucks,” he said. True, but consider: Jaboulet’s fabulous 1988 Hermitage La Chapelle sells for about $50 a bottle and this wine is a close approximation of it, making it a good value.