I'd like to hear from the old(er) timers

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

First, my credentials, because a lot of people upthread are not going to like what I have to say.

1. My 70th birthday was last Wednesday.
2. My first noteworthy and really good bottle of wine was a Beaujolais I was served at age 15 on the train from Lucerne to Paris in 1967.
3. My first ever first growth Bordeaux was at age 17 after my high school graduation ceremony in 1969, when I had a small glass of 1928 Ch. Margaux that a friend’s father had put away for him when he was born in 1951.
4. In the first luxury cuvée of wine I drank that I paid for was a bottle of Liebfraumich in November 1969 before the first ever Bo Schembechler/Woody Hayes football game in Ann Arbor. We considered is a luxury cuvée because it caused $0.25 more than Blue Nun.
5. My next struggle with wine pricing was in 1976, when I had to buy a great bottle of wine to bring to a friend’s house to celebrate the fact that we were all graduating from law school. I had a choice between the 1971 Ausone and the 1971 Yquem and I bought the Ausone because it was cheaper - $9 versus $11. It was a mistake because my friend served escargot tat she had been growing in a fish tank all year and what had only eaten garlic greens for that year. I think the Yquem would have been a better pairing but I didn’t know about pairings yet.
6. I bought my first ever first growth in about 1977. A 1973 Ch. Mouton that I still own because The Count elected not to drink it at my house a few months ago.

That said, I really do not need to read most of the comments above (I read a few just to confirm) because everyone wants to complain about Parkerization and spoofing because the Devil came out of the volcanic eruption of Mount Ruiz in Columbia, South America, in 1985 and ruined winemaking for everyone except the cognoscenti. That, IMNSHO, is complete and utter bullshit.

I have no doubt that the average quality of wine available today is light-years ahead of what I could buy in the 1970s. The fact that the 1945 Port that I had in 1981 was better than the 1994 Port that I had in 2017 relates only to the fact that the latter was 23 years old while the former was 36 years old. I have 2 bottles of the 1994 left and if I make it to 2030, I expect that the 1994 will be just as good or better. No way will I make it to 2060, but if I leave the last bottle to my grandson, it will certainly be better than the 1955 Cockburn I had this summer.

I cannot fathom why everyone seems to think that every human endeavor, from running the 100 meter dash to designing safe automobiles to eradicating disease as a result of scientific advancement, is better today than it was 50 years ago, except winemaking. Did humans all of a sudden get stupid when it comes to winemaking? What we really have here in this site is a large, inbred gene pool that draws its knowledge from other people in the same pool. I frequently drink wine with “normal people.” I also refuse to serve them wine that I consider to be inferior and thus save the “really good stuff” for the “experts.” I regularly get responses like “Wow, this is great,” or “This is the best wine I ever had” when I serve things like Saxum or SQN to them. Wake up and smell the Surströmming. It is not good and we do not need to use inferior processes from the dark ages. Let’s put the Wineberserkers version of Hipsterism in the grave forever.

For some people modern cars are simply better than cars from the 60s-80s. Without doubt there’s a lot of improvements that make them more reliable, safer, have better emissions, etc.

But for some of us, those older cars had so much more character(and flaws). And whether it’s the E-type Jaguars, muscle cars, or Volkswagen Things, those are just so much more interesting than the Lexus, Prius, and Escalades of today.

[Greg_K]

as to whoever quoted me as saying “the average person who is not into wine loves Saxum,” I never said that and did not come close. If you can find me having said that, I will give you a bottle of Saxum for free. There is a fundamental approach disease that many people here suffer from. That disease is not knowing the difference between “I do not know the difference” and “I cannot tell the difference.” People often say to me that good wine is wasted on them because “I can’t tell the difference.” My response is uniformly, “you may not know the difference, but you can certainly tell the difference.” People should not confuse the two, especially when it comes to “knowing” that GC Burgs are great. I finally had a glass of Petrus a few weeks ago and although it was good, I found it to be only a tiny bit better than an off year of Araujo we drank right after it. Sometimes conventional wisdom is not so wise.

Jay, while I think you’re referring to my post, you also didn’t pay close attention to what I wrote either. Consistently in blind tasting for the average person (who’s not interested in wine) wines that are higher in alcohol content and sugar content score higher. That person will appreciate Saxum a lot more than many grand cru red burgundies. That person is also not wrong, because palate prefernces never are. But that person is also not the target audience of this forum. You are making the argument that person is actually demonstrating Saxum is “better” by being able to tell the difference. I don’t know - the one wine my Mom (a notorious drinker of the most sugary lighter fluid imaginable) and I agreed upon recently was…a Mugneret-Gibourg Chaignots.
Also, I do not want a free bottle of Saxum. I suppose I could make a joke here about its quality, but the truth is I just don’t like Saxum.

I will also add, as I know you and like you, there’s really no need for the condescension; I do not “know that GC Burgs are great”. I have opened plenty that are not, and I got my start in wine in Napa when I was in school out in the Bay Area. I’ve drunk plenty of Napa cab and still have a few I bought when $40 seemed like a massive reach. The only rule of wine is to drink what you like, and if you like Saxum, that’s great - you should drink it. But that doesn’t mean people who like Burgundy are drinking it out of some perverse pretense at hipsterism. The reason I don’t drink wines like Saxum is because I don’t like them.

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

As someone who is in between I would just note that it is much more difficult to just say “lets splurge” and get that ‘agreed upon by all’ top wine. The prices really are on another level now. For the non-wealthy trying a top end wine is a real decision and not a mere whim.

There is likely more good wine across many regions and price levels. But there are also more wines that have veered away from the non-traditional. Many of those wines are same-y rather than singularly great. So likely more knowledge or research is required prior to purchase now than say in the 80’s prior to much of the ‘modernization’ of wine creation.

I agree with everything you say, Cris, except the bolded part. If you go back a few decades, there were definitely more poorly made and flawed wines on the market from the Old World, so you couldn’t blindly buy, say, a mid-priced Chianti or cru bourgeois Bordeaux with great confidence. So you sometimes had to do some research to avoid a different kind of problem.

What I meant was that in order to avoid the multitude of ‘good’ wines that exist now in a more homogenized mold you have to do some research and acquire knowledge that will allow you to find those that till make a more traditional styled wine. You could say its flipped from what you describe.

I am 100% in agreement with this.

You can grab almost any bottle off a store shelf and get a nice wine…everyone in the world can hit their marks with the modern winemaking formula. And almost any major producer will never put a wine at risk, so most current wines are like a Honda Civic or a Humvee. There are exceptions, but finding them is as hard or harder(IMO) than it used to be to find really good and really cool wines.

And the bandwidth of modern wines, well made as they are, is so much narrower than the bandwidth of traditionally made wines. If I was an occasional consumer, modern wines consistency would be great. But I enjoyed the exploration of wine enough to hunt down really good producers in all of my favorite regions.

I’ve no love for the natural wine movement, but it should be considered that some of the success of those wines, often flawed, is due in some small way to the homogenious nature of most modern wines.

[R_M_Kriete]

I cannot fathom why everyone seems to think that every human endeavor, from running the 100 meter dash to designing safe automobiles to eradicating disease as a result of scientific advancement, is better today than it was 50 years ago, except winemaking. Did humans all of a sudden get stupid when it comes to winemaking?

Do you believe that we have moved forward in all areas of human endeavor in the past 50 years – that progress has been universal?

Certainly not with vaccines. The old method of inoculating someone with Cow pox pus to prevent smallpox is much better than this newfangled mRNA thingamabob

[Greg_K]

I agree with everything you say, Cris, except the bolded part. If you go back a few decades, there were definitely more poorly made and flawed wines on the market from the Old World, so you couldn’t blindly buy, say, a mid-priced Chianti or cru bourgeois Bordeaux with great confidence. So you sometimes had to do some research to avoid a different kind of problem.

What I meant was that in order to avoid the multitude of ‘good’ wines that exist now in a more homogenized mold you have to do some research and acquire knowledge that will allow you to find those that till make a more traditional styled wine. You could say its flipped from what you describe.

I am 100% in agreement with this.

You can grab almost any bottle off a store shelf and get a nice wine…everyone in the world can hit their marks with the modern winemaking formula. And almost any major producer will never put a wine at risk, so most current wines are like a Honda Civic or a Humvee. There are exceptions, but finding them is as hard or harder(IMO) than it used to be to find really good and really cool wines.

And the bandwidth of modern wines, well made as they are, is so much narrower than the bandwidth of traditionally made wines. If I was an occasional consumer, modern wines consistency would be great. But I enjoyed the exploration of wine enough to hunt down really good producers in all of my favorite regions.

I’ve no love for the natural wine movement, but it should be considered that some of the success of those wines, often flawed, is due in some small way to the homogenious nature of most modern wines.

I agree with this, though I also think this is primarily a “general progress” vs “specific progress” kind of issue. For the average consumer, today’s wine is vastly better. For a person that loves wine, the challenges are different. There are a lot fewere bottles with obvious brett, fewer issues like the time Ducru had a 5 year taint issues and just didn’t bother addressing it, but as you say - some of the wine is made by the same negociants in some places to taste the same. For the person that just wants a nice Chianti, that’s GREAT. For me? Well…

[David_Baum]

I’m 58 with a full cellar. Id give away every bottle in my cellar gratis and start over anew if I could be 30 again.

I can print you a new birth certificate, once the cellar arrives at my apartment front desk.

Wouldnt work as it would be behind a paywall

[Arv_R]

I’ve no love for the natural wine movement, but it should be considered that some of the success of those wines, often flawed, is due in some small way to the homogenious nature of most modern wines.

“Flawed … or misunderestimated?” - AF

[Thomas_Keim]

When I first got into the wine business (mid 1970s), there was tons of bad vintage wines on the market from France and Italy. I remember thinking (at the time) that the 1973 Beychevelle was one of the greatest Bordeaux I had ever tasted.

But they were cheap. But there was also a plethora of old Bordeaux and Burgundy on the market at ridiculously low prices. I remember gorging myself with 1961 Latricieres Chambertin half bottles for $9 each. There were a ton of 1950s everywhere, so that was fun as well. BUT, the quality in both categories was all over the place. I wouldn’t have cooked with the early 70s vintages of Margaux (for example).

TODAY, with prices where they are now - you have to look at the little guys in Bordeaux instead of Classifieds, and village wines from Burgundy instead of 1er Crus - frankly, quality has jumped up so much that really isn’t the big letdown in Quality you would have seen 50 years ago -

[dsimmons]

I have been serious about wine since the late 90"s. For my tastes the overall quality and consistency of wine have improved significantly. Pricing has increased as well.

I also agree with a lot of the comments Jay Hack made.
I also believe that much of the disagreement here is due to differences in personal preferences which I try never to question.

[Alan_Rath]

No doubt it is more difficult, and much more expensive, to buy and drink the top end wines from most regions. And I would argue that today there are a lot more wines that go “cult” and become literally an order of magnitude pricier and more difficult to obtain. The truth is that, with a tiny number of exceptions, you can come close to replicating the experience of those wines at much lower price points. If you have to have the label - for yourself, or your posse - that’s obviously an issue. But if you just want really good wine, there are usually many other options.

What we do have that we didn’t in the “old days” (which for me is the 80s and 90s) is the internet, which is a double edged sword. Word of mouth travels much faster over the internet than by mailed paper, then add all the tools for finding wines and information about them, and nothing stays quiet very long. But the other edge of the sword is that we now have knowledge of, and access to, so many more wines, well made, interesting, from all over the world.

While I’d love to be able to go back and buy wines 30 years ago again, if you gave me the choice between doing that, with the much more limited tools (and number of quality wines) available then, I think I’d choose to stay in today’s world of wine. That might not stock my cellar with first growths and grand crus, but I think I’d be drinking better overall.

[Ian_Sutton]

Happy birthday for last week Jay!

[Dan_A]

When I first got into the wine business (mid 1970s), there was tons of bad vintage wines on the market from France and Italy. I remember thinking (at the time) that the 1973 Beychevelle was one of the greatest Bordeaux I had ever tasted.

But they were cheap. But there was also a plethora of old Bordeaux and Burgundy on the market at ridiculously low prices. I remember gorging myself with 1961 Latricieres Chambertin half bottles for $9 each. There were a ton of 1950s everywhere, so that was fun as well. BUT, the quality in both categories was all over the place. I wouldn’t have cooked with the early 70s vintages of Margaux (for example).

TODAY, with prices where they are now - you have to look at the little guys in Bordeaux instead of Classifieds, and village wines from Burgundy instead of 1er Crus - frankly, quality has jumped up so much that really isn’t the big letdown in Quality you would have seen 50 years ago -

I agree with Thomas especially the last paragraph but as our consumption has grown in the US along with our intake of wine critics/publications it was inevitable that prices would go up and hopefully quality with that to reach the people who unlike this community would prefer to see a score and buy it as opposed to “exploring” as it was prior to critics etc…

[Thomas_Keim]

I agree with Thomas especially the last paragraph but as our consumption has grown in the US along with our intake of wine critics/publications it was inevitable that prices would go up and hopefully quality with that to reach the people who unlike this community would prefer to see a score and buy it as opposed to “exploring” as it was prior to critics etc…

It’s been a pretty long cycle. For every bottle of 1982 Lafite I sold for $33 a bottle and bragged about, someone will be there showing me a receipt of a bottle of 1961 Lafite they bought for $6. Then there will be someone who purchased a 1952 Lafite for $3 -

[Victor_Hong]

I agree with Thomas especially the last paragraph but as our consumption has grown in the US along with our intake of wine critics/publications it was inevitable that prices would go up and hopefully quality with that to reach the people who unlike this community would prefer to see a score and buy it as opposed to “exploring” as it was prior to critics etc…

It’s been a pretty long cycle. For every bottle of 1982 Lafite I sold for $33 a bottle and bragged about, someone will be there showing me a receipt of a bottle of 1961 Lafite they bought for $6. Then there will be someone who purchased a 1952 Lafite for $3 -

And none of this matters, going forward.

[Patrick_Duffy]

As usual, I love Jay’s comments, and his style. I watched a video yesterday of a commencement speech by Lou Holtz. He told the graduates to listen up. “I’ve been 18. You’ve never been 78.”

“Everything tastes the same. And the prices for it are real high.” Sounds like supply and demand at work. More demand for the trophy wines, from more countries, and the trophy wines don’t have as many bad vintages as they used to, due to better wine making and global warming. All of it is getting sold, even at these prices, to somebody, whether they are consuming it by drinking it or by bragging about what’s in their cellar. If that’s what people want and will pay for, why should I care? I can get something else that’s very, very enjoyable for a reasonable (event suitable) price. it’s not from a first growth or equivalent, but probably another area of the world that nobody ever heard of 40 years ago. And don’t we always say that price is not always an indicator of quality?

Another upgrade that I think I’ve noticed: How many 21st century bottles are you pouring out because they’re corked, ‘off,’ musty, etc.? I think the number of bottles that are bad when they are opened is much lower. YMMV.

And nobody has mentioned Oregon, which barely existed 40 years ago. It’s not just this or that obscure area of the world that we can now access. It’s also a wider variety of areas with significant quality producers.

[Al_Osterheld]

It’s not just that the internet has made it easier for everyone to find wines. A bigger factor is that there are many, many more buyers interested in higher end wines and with financial means to purchase many of them. More countries have middle to upper middle class consumers (or higher) and more of those consumers in every country have become interested in wine compared with a few decades ago.

Fortunately, there are still so many wines I want to explore and love to drink at prices I’m willing to pay.

-Al

[John_Morris]

I cannot fathom why everyone seems to think that every human endeavor, from running the 100 meter dash to designing safe automobiles to eradicating disease as a result of scientific advancement, is better today than it was 50 years ago, except winemaking. Did humans all of a sudden get stupid when it comes to winemaking?

Do you believe that we have moved forward in all areas of human endeavor in the past 50 years – that progress has been universal?

To me there’s another side to it - progress often comes in fits and starts; there’s no guarantee that the winemaking Jay touts is the direction wine will go in permanently. Lots of scientific “advances” don’t end up being right in something so untheoretical as wine; Guy Accad in Burgundy is a great example.

Overall I agree with Jay, that wine has gotten better in the last 50 years, but whether the small part of that change that’s due to Rolland is a net positive, or will be seen as more of a wrong brach remains hard to say. That said, Jay’s argument of “the average person who’s not into wine loves Saxum” is a red herring - this is a question for people who love wine, not for people who don’t care about it.

“Wine has gotten better” as a general matter? I’d say the proportion of technically clean, respectable wines is certainly higher, and that’s a good thing. But I think you have to look type by type, rather than generalize about “wine.”

One’s answer isn’t just about science. A good analogy might be photography or music. There were big strides in color slide film in the 1970s (fabulous leaps forward with Ektachrome and Kodachrome), and then digital photography, with all its advantages, overtook silver-based film. There’s no comparison between the quality of images from today’s point-and-shoot cameras or phones and even the best 35mm point-and-shoot cameras of 30 years ago. And PhotoShop was developed, giving photographers all sorts of new tools.

But would you say photography has improved? Are the images today better than what Henri Cartier-Bresson shot with an early Leica in the 1930s on ASA 10 film? That’s a matter of taste.

Same thing with music. Analog recording improved (better mikes, better recording equipment), then digital equipment came in, allowing engineers to clean up new and old recordings and control the final mix more precisely. That opened all sorts of doors.

But is music any better than in 1970? It depends on your taste.

Wine is more like that than internal combustion technology.

[JIMCOH]

I cannot fathom why everyone seems to think that every human endeavor, from running the 100 meter dash to designing safe automobiles to eradicating disease as a result of scientific advancement, is better today than it was 50 years ago, except winemaking. Did humans all of a sudden get stupid when it comes to winemaking?

Do you believe that we have moved forward in all areas of human endeavor in the past 50 years – that progress has been universal?

Pretty much, You would have to find some unknown item to show me something that has not improved. Have you ever drive an 1950s car? That alone should convince you. I drove those thing to a 3 figures speed and can tell you that they were categorically unsafe at any speed. Luckily there were very few cars on the road.

[Adam_Frisch]

I grew up in the era of the imported “village cooperative wines” from France and Italy the 80’s in Sweden (not a wine savvy country then) and let me tell you - it was not a pleasant experience. Almost unfathomably bad, most of them. Screeching, horrible things. My grandfather was a huge wine nerd and he would always introduce me to different wines and there was a reason Aussie Shiraz, South African wines, Argentinian and early California wines made big inroads into the frozen palates of the barbarians - they were just better and more accessible wines compared to most of the Euro wines (Spain was an exception).

So, quite opposite from most US consumers experience, for me the connotations of French and Italian wine did not equal quality at the time. My idolization of wine went more towards the New World than Europe, which would explain why I know so little about French and Italian wines. Cause they sucked back then and it didn’t promote more exploring (I’m sure if I’d had more funds when young, I might have encountered a lot better French wines).

I know quality has improved immensely across the board since then in Europe (largely thanks to the New World competition), but check Cellartracker and the amplitude is still very much in evidence: the highest and lowest scored wines are more often than not French or Italian. New World, for all its faults of syrupy largesse, is much more even. Chances of getting a real screeching dud are smaller here than in Europe. This is the whole reason New World got a foothold at all - there were too many bad wines produced in Europe at the time.

[JIMCOH]

For some people modern cars are simply better than cars from the 60s-80s. Without doubt there’s a lot of improvements that make them more reliable, safer, have better emissions, etc.

But for some of us, those older cars had so much more character(and flaws). And whether it’s the E-type Jaguars, muscle cars, or Volkswagen Things, those are just so much more interesting than the Lexus, Prius, and Escalades of today.

As I mentioned above, I drove most of them and they sucked then and now. If you want to drive a 1950s car, put it on a modern chassis and suspension and give it a modern engine. Then maybe you will have something.

By the way, there are much more interesting modern vehicles than the Prius, Lexus, and Escalade. They may be representative of today’s cars, but they are certainly pedestrian.