I had a bottle of La Conseillante 2017 recently and it was simply incredible. I got this for $130, a discount of 50% to recent vintages. I’m thinking about going back and getting more but this is considered an off vintage, with a rating of 95 vs 99 for some of the recent vintages. Can someone give me an idea of what the quality gap is like for a 4 point gap between vintages of the same wine? Does it justify +50% price in your experience? Thanks!
you can do a simple mental trick and just completely ignore points for wines that you know you like. they might be useful for wines you don’t know yet, but for those you’ve tried, someone else’s points cannot possibly matter.
once you do that, you’ll realize that the price differences for different point spreads are merely ways of extracting money from people that haven’t figured out this trick yet.
you now have an advantage over those people.
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La Conseillante is one of my favorite Bordeaux and I love the 2017. I first tasted it at a dinner where we also had the 2015 and 2018 and i preferred it to both of those, though they are richer and more concentrated. It’s possible that the bigger wines will be better in the future, but not necessarily. From around the 80’s, the “best” vintages of this wine are the 89 and 90, but I enjoy the 81 and 85 just about as much and for some occasions they’re better.
Thanks to you both!
Craig, out of curiosity, would you mind elaborating on why you preferred '17 over the '15/'18? I guess I’ll just have to buy both bottles and see for myself 
If you’re willing to buy and taste the others, I’d strongly recommend it. 2016, 2019, and 2020 are other very strong recent vintages with very high ratings. If you try one or two of those or 15/18 you can get an idea if the power and concentration of these wines is more to your taste than the 2017.
For my taste, the 2017 has plenty of flavor and I found it wonderfully balanced. It drinks very well for a young Bordeaux. Given all that and the price difference you originally pointed out, it made more sense to me to buy more 2017 than the others, but I bought some of all these wines as La Conseillante has consistently been one of my favorites.
I’m a big fan of La Conseillante. I like 2017, but there are better vintages to purchase, with style that is better for La Conseillante.