What Price Burgundy? : ’90 Burgundies: Big Wines, Big Prices

Burgundy is blessed with a fourth great vintage in the last six years, spurring a frenzy of buying. Lovers of red Burgundy are eagerly snapping up the 1990 vintage, confident it is as rich, powerful and long-lived as early reports say.

But is this a truly great vintage? The 1990 red wines I’ve tasted were dense and rich and fun to drink, but were unlike “classic” Burgundies of past excellent vintages such as 1989 and 1988.

Make no mistake: These ’90 wines will appeal to many. They are wines with a concentration rarely seen in red Burgundies. Even the lightest of them, such as the wines from the Cote de Beaune, are thick and powerful. For instance, a 1990 Volnay from Joseph Drouhin ($35) was so deep and tannic I couldn’t even tell it was from Volnay. And one merchant tells me he quickly sold out of a Mercurey (a region that usually doesn’t produce very dark wines) because “this one was a monster.”

“The buzzword with this vintage is big ,” says Sacramento wine merchant Darrell Corti, but he is quick to point out that with red Burgundy, what is as frequently prized is the sense of terroir --the flavors specific to the area the wine was grown.

“Big is not necessarily synonymous with very good,” says Corti, “and yet some people prefer bigness over typicality. Instead of having the wine meet typical standards of a region, they are no longer typical, so they are considered as being simply ‘great.’ ”

In some wine publications, so thick and purple was the prose attending the impending arrival of the 1990s that the wines were much in demand even before they were available for sale. And with demand came higher prices. The best wines were being quoted at $80 to $100 a bottle, with payment or part payment expected before arrival.

Even in a recession, that has dissuaded few wine geeks. One San Francisco merchant told me he sold more than $500,000 worth of the ’90 reds on a pre-arrival basis. During a lackluster year in 1992, “It’s saved my hide,” he says.

The lack of resistance to high pricing for the 1990s, says Corti, is partly a result of the mania in the United States for the “best” wines.

“This country is still in the mode where we can sell something by telling people it’s a big wine, where bigness in itself is what sells the wine,” says Corti. “But there are a plethora of good wines out there that are not big but are typical of their region.” He says he now is offering some of the 1986 and 1983 red Burgundies, “vintages that have developed very well.”

The enthusiasm for these wines, however, has created an availability problem. Many of the better wines were sold out before they were shipped. Even many lesser wines never reached the West Coast because of demand in New York, Washington and other eastern cities.

Because of that demand, some wholesalers required wine shops to buy “packages,” meaning that in order to get some of the best of the 1990 Burgundies, a merchant also had to buy some less-desirable wine. One West Los Angeles merchant says: “To get the $5,000 worth of stuff we wanted we had to spend $20,000, and we now have a lot of Burgundy that won’t move for a long time.”

Thus it is vital for a consumer to speak directly with a merchant to determine that merchant’s real commitment to each wine. Better yet, taste a bottle of anything before buying a case. But if you really like these wines, act quickly. They’re disappearing fast.