Where is all the aged Burgundy?

The consensus of the board seems to be that well made Burgundy (at least red) requires 10 or more years to show best. Most seem to agree that Bordeaux likewise requires a decent amount of age. So why is it so much harder to track down Burgundy with age than Bordeaux? I realize that way more Bordeaux is produced than Burgundy, but there is certainly no shortage of Burgundy available on fine wine retailer sites online. So what’s the deal?

A quick glance at Benchmark, which is a retailer I like, shows 226 Bordeaux and 292 Burgundies for sale. So it’s not that Burgundies aren’t available. There are 33 Bordeaux older than 1990, but only 5 Burgundies. If you include all the 90s there are 78 Bordeaux, but only 51 Burgundies. In addition, a decent number of aged Bordeaux are on the (somewhat) affordable end, while the Burgundies are mostly stratospheric.

Is it just due to the ridiculous Burgundy Bubble that seems to just get bigger and bigger and never pop? Is there some place to get these aged Burgundies that I am not aware of?

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The answer is really simple. It’s a giant commitment for a retailer to hang on to stock that long. Additionally most release wines after two years at most. Producers gotta have the cash flow. Robert Ampeau is an exception. So, these are two strikes this against seeing older wines. Lastly, people that actually do hold, like myself, would want HUGE prices to part with stuff which in the US can cause legal problems. So that argues against aged burgs. Plus even if you do get the big money, you’d still have to wait 15 years for the stuff to mature. So not a chance that you’ll get good village level or 1er Cru wines. Grand Cru pricing is just stupid all over the place.

So the long story short…the gods have commanded “make them yourself or suffer.” That’s just the nature of the beast.

BTW, 10 years is often not long enough. Case and point, Pavelot’s 2006 Savigny-Les-Beaune 1er Crus are just starting to come around. I had two Chevillon Nuits-St.-Georges 1er Crus from 2007 two Sundays ago that were nice but nothing to write home about. It’s a steep hill to climb if you decide to climb it.

There is some aged Burgundy downstairs in my cellar and a whole bunch in the cellars of a number of my friends. There are a lot more people who buy Bordeaux for investment than who buy Burgundy for investment. My guess is that is why there is more aged Bordeaux available for sale.

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Burgundy wines are produced in minuscule quantities. There’s never much of it, even on release. By the time it would be aged enough to fit your query the data set is cut by, what, 70%?

I’m not entirely sure you want to source Burgundy from the 80s; provenance is likely not great unless you’re buying from Europe.

im curious if the investment piece is something that we will see change as some of the burgs from the 00s and 10s start to pick up age. I would venture that the idea of burgundy has picked up a lot of steam as a commodity in the last two decades. although I agree, this has been a feature of Bordeaux buying for… forever. I do think that more people who own burgundy that CURRENTLY has age on it now, though, bought it with the intention of drinking, and I think this will be more of a feature of the burgundy stock that is currently aging.

Don’t really know, but if so it likely did not start before the 2005 vintage.

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Have you checked Fu’s Instagram? Last time I saw it, it was all there.

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It’s all about quantity. And the fact that, because of the quantities, Bordeaux has always been more of a commodity, stored and sold by the trade with age.

The number of SKUs you cite isn’t what’s important. What are the quantities of the 226 Bordeaux and 292 Burgundies? I bet there are case quantities available of many of the former and not many of the latter.

Put another way: How many bottles are available of each, not how many individual wines?

Am thankful for that. Very well priced as well. I’ve gone through around 10 bottles of their ‘93 Volnay-Santenots 1er Cru the past couple of months, as well as around 6 of their ‘93 Pommard (and a couple of their ‘92 as well just to test). All were ordered/purchased direct from their cellar and flown in. No duds so far amongst said bottles. That said, the other bottles of theirs I’ve tried out (e.g., ‘94 & ‘96 Volnay-Santenots 1er Cru) I didn’t find interesting enough to reorder.

I suspect this is starting to change, but I think it may have been true historically.

I think the larger factor, as others have said, is that Bordeaux produces so much more wine than burgundy does. But I think that both are factors.

Where is all the aged Burgundy?

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They are in my cellar! :slight_smile:
Some of the 99s are just about coming around.
The 98s have been drinking well for 3-4 years and are holding
The 97s at GC level have been delicious for 4-5 years, the lesser wines, some are crumbling
The 95s and 96s are simply variable
The 94s have never been very interesting
Unfortunately, I’ve drunk all but half a dozen of my 93s, nearly all of my 92s and all of my 91 and 90s :frowning:

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A lot of investors in wine know something about wine but may not be experts. It has long been easy to buy Bordeaux for investment. Look at first growths and super seconds and a handful of right bank wines, etc. Find out the Parker score, and you are done.

For Burgundy, until more recent times, it was harder for the investment class to learn with Burgs to buy for investment other than maybe DRC. I think Allen Meadows made information about more top estates more easily accessible to more people (similarly to the way Parker did for Bordeaux in the early 1980s). 2005 was the “superstar” vintage for these people in the Burghound era just like 1982 was in the early Wine Advocate days. It is possible that more people bought vintages like 2005 and 2015 for investment. Time will tell. But, then, we still have the production issues.

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Twofold…1] supply, there is an ocean of Bordeaux produced, so much so that much is held back to give the illusion of scarcity and help increase prices, whereas Burgundy is produced in such small quantities by comparison. 2] demand, selling out an entire wine from a Burgundy producer isn’t difficult so a collector may get 3 to 6 bottles of it vs. Bordeaux you can own cases of it, so if you are a collector you don’t want to resell your Burgundy because it is nigh impossible to replace it with back or current vintages.

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Bordeaux has 120’000 hectares of vineyards, Burgundy has 28’000 hectares. Almost five times less. Then they say, there is just 1% of Burgundy in the Grand Cru Category.

Also another comparison sheds some light on why there is no availability: Lafites vineyards are 107 hectares, Mouton 90 hectares and Latour with 78 hectares. So roughly 280 hectars for just the three Pauillac first growths. That’s exactly the same amount of hectars as all red wine Grand Cru appellations in Burgundy combined (except Corton with its 97 hectares).

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No further questions your honour!

To summarize the above, great aged Burgundy is too good to sell. It is priceless.

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Contra some of the above, I see plenty of aged Burgundy at auction (if aged means say 2010 or before). Not nearly as much as Bordeaux of course, but not too far off the ratio you would expect given the lower production of Burgundy compared to Bordeaux. Certainly in line with the one-fifth figure someone quoted above. The high end auction houses seem to put up a lot of fancier Burgundy from a range of years just like they do first growths.

I do think one difference is that you see less Burgundy from prior to say 1985 or 1990 than you do Bordeaux. Definitely way less from before 1980. Might be because of low quality in Burgundy from those eras, or (perhaps heresy to say around here), Burgundy just doesn’t age/last as long as Bordeaux. I’ll often see people saying that Bordeaux from 1986, 1989 or 1990 is at peak with many years to go, or maybe even still a bit too young, but the usual assumption seems to be that Burgundy from those years would be on their last legs.

I think there’s a significant difference between auction houses and retailers here. Because library stocks of Bordeaux are so big and chateaux/negociants regularly do new releases of old vintages onto the market, retailers can easily get hold of older Bordeaux vintages. For older Burgundy vintages there’s more reliance on collectors and it ends up at auction.

As others have mentioned, the principal reason is of course quantity.

But there are secondary reasons too.

It seems to me that people buy Burg different than they buy Bdx. If you buy Bdx by the case, it’s easy to sell 6 if you don’t love the wine or are doing some housecleaning. But if you have only 3-6 of each bottle, you’re often talking about selling single bottles or pairs, which is tougher and often not worth the trouble. Also makes each bottle dearer.

Also, even the total quantity of Burg overstates things, because there’s not much of a commodity market for non-GC/1er Burgs, so very little aged villages/regional wine ever gets offered.

In short, finding aged Burgs of good provenance is indeed challenging. But it’s not impossible. I find that the best strategy with backfilling is often not to look for stuff that’s decades old–but instead to try to find stuff that’s 10-15 years old–like buying 05s, 09s, and 10s now–because there’s more availability, better provenance, less price escalation, and you still get a big head start on maturity.