If there was a vintner to pick in 03, this had to be one of them. High yields with minimal extraction vinification. He probably got all the grapes quite ripe in this vintage and it better odds of being successful. I only bought a couple of 03’s but thanks for the push to open one. Good idea for a thread, where are the 03’s now?
Trapet was a go-to for us, Mark. Their price increases have been the most distressing part of the bubble.
Rossignol Trapet is half the price, although I have found Trapet itself is a smidgeon better.
I have a lot of wines from Rossignol-Trapet and have visited there a number of times. Excellent QPR for Burgundy.
At a Burg. dinner in Toronto that Andrew Arntfield posted on we drank the 2003 Clos de Tart. It was the consensu wine of the night. While rich, it was beautiful on the nose and silky on the palate. I’m opening up a 2003 Henri Gouges Les St. Georges this coming week at another dinner. I’ll report back on that one.
Depends how long your time horizon is. Likely all of today’s prices for great burgundies will only go higher over the next 5,10,15 and 20 years.Since most of the red wines I buy can’t be drunk for 7-25 years - this is just a small blip in an ever increasing scarcity of great wines.
There’s very little speculation in the fine wine market these days. There was a wave of wine funds 10 years ago, but virtually none are left. Individual buyers are not speculators. They generally drink the wines. Expensive burgundies also aren’t an attractive target for speculation–they’re already really expensive. The notion that people buying them are speculators is palliative to those who believe it, but it isn’t true.
The idea that wines get traded a lot is also generally wrong. Successive price rises cause some turnover because wines change prices and the owner chooses to sell rather than drink. But it’s foolish to think that rich people sit around buying and selling wines like they are stocks–just think about the headaches and transaction costs, and you’ll realize it doesn’t make sense. People sell things they decide they don’t love or won’t drink etc. But very few collectors really trade. It’s hard enough for the merchants to make a positive margin; it’s really impossible for private collectors.
Prices go up and down, like with anything else. But current burgundy prices are underpinned by very strong fundamentals–limited supply and strong demand. And finally, it is obvious to anyone who participates in the burgundy market that the world has been a huge net consumer of burgundy over the past 20 years. Just go to a dinner. 10 years ago, wealthy collectors used to drink lots of bottles from the 70s, 80s, even older. These days you see a lot of 99s, 2000s, 2001s with the same crowd. Anyone who is waiting for a big wave of wines to hit the market will be disappointed. They’ve been drunk.
I am seeing the opposite, esp. with regard to white Burgundy. I feel like a lot of whites that were around $60-75 a could of years ago (like 2014 premier crus) are now in many cases $100-$150 for 2017s.