Yes there are more and a wider variety of fine wines than ever before. There are also iconic wines. If you are knowledgeable and interested in wine, wouldn’t you want to at least try the icons? If you love Bordeaux, wouldn’t you want to try the 1er growths? Dry Rieslings and Clos Ste. Hune? Northern Rhone and Chave? I was fortunate in buying these decades ago when I could afford them. Now I wouldn’t have a chance. Would I trade them for lesser wines? No.
No. For there to be a wine crash, we likely would need an economic crash. Wine prices went down in 1973-1974, 1982-1983 and 2008-2009. See a pattern. I would much prefer high wine prices.
Mark,
I think that what has happened is that salaries have really gone up dramatically over the years for people in certain professions - banking, tech, attorneys at top law firms, doctors in certain specialties, for example. These and other industries have experience huge growth all over the world (certainly in #s of people, probably less in percentage of the population). These people can afford current wine prices - or maybe go down from 1st growths to second growths or from Rousseau Chambertin to Rossignol-Trapet Chambertin or something like that. Thus, I think current pricing (or higher in the future) can be sustained for a long time. You are correct. It is a shame that true wine lovers whose salaries have not kept pace with the salaries in these industries are finding the great wines of the world less and less affordable. This truly is sad, but I don’t see this changing.
I think a lot of younger people on this thread don’t really understand what you are talking about because they never lived in an era where these wines were affordable. Does it really matter whether Romanee Conti is $1000 a bottle or $10,000 a bottle. Many younger people here never saw anything like 1980 DRC Grands Echezeaux for $35 or 1990 1st growths for $60 on futures. Therefore, they really cannot understand what you are talking about.
I am not sure exactly what the dividing line is between affordable and not affordable, but there are still a lot of truly classic wines in the $100-150 range such as Ridge Monte Bello (at least on futures), Chateau Montelena, good (but not great) vintage Bordeauxs like 2014 Ducru Beaucaillou, Champagnes such as 2006 Taittinger Comte de Champagne and growers such as Prevost, Barolo from producers such as Marcarini or crus from Vajra, 2014 Volnay Taillepieds from D’Angerville, etc. Even from the classic regions, there are still ways to get great wines using brains rather than money. And, then there is JJ Prum.
Yes, you’d want to try all those wines. But - and I absolutely believe this - there is no wine which is so “head and shoulders” above the rest that not to try that particular wine means you have missed out on a lifetime experience. Also, there are perhaps a handful of wines that are so expensive that the average wine hobbyist couldn’t manage to try one, even if it means sharing a bottle among a group of friends (something I’ve done). DRC, Comte Liger-Belair, the top wines from a tiny handful of the most sought after Burg producers, what else? Almost everything else is attainable to anyone on this board if they truly want to experience it.
But, of course, that’s different than buying and drinking those wines regularly, which I guess is the point of this thread.
I totally agree with Howard.
Pick yourself up off the floor, Howard.
Agree with Howard about T Comtes being a good buy.
I remember looking at first Growth futures around 2004 and they were about 120 per btl (I believe it was 01 vintage).
I remember first time spending more than 100 at auction on a bottle of wine - in 2000 for a bottle of 70 Lafite
Opened it at my wedding the next year but didn’t drink much
oh i should point out I absolutely agree with that. but even in that range, a $100-150 a bottle wine is maybe a twice a year type of thing in our house. Once we get above that, we’re moving into the unobtainable because there are just more important things that money is earmarked for. that still leaves me with more choices than I could ever hope to experience in a single lifetime, which is why its exciting to be drinking wine right now, but it also excludes classic benchmark wines. someone earlier mentioned those top 100 world producers. Some of them are still in that range or below. a lot are not.
this is the part that i think gets lost with some of us younger posters. ive seen a lot of posts talking about the plethora of enjoyable wine out there, but without most of us ever being able to experience these benchmark wines, how am i supposed to be able to understand what makes those ones GREAT and the really good ones just really good?
maybe we’re better off NOT knowing. then I’m not comparing every other Pinot I drink to a DRC. haha!
Speak for yourself - Doctors - in any specialty - make a fraction of what was made 20 years ago. Our salaries have done nothing but declined over the past decade, relative to our overhead and inflation.
I do pretty well for a doctor and cannot afford Rousseau. Should I buy Rossignol?
I like the wines of Rossignol-Trapet. Cannot say whether you will
I am not a doctor but I work with some and my sister is one. I do see that their salaries are a fraction of what they were 20 years ago - if that fraction when converted to percentage is a number well over 100%.
I know an orthopedic surgeon (hip replacements) who today makes 800k+ and 10 years ago was making less than half of that.
You can find anything you want on the Internet, and I found these links quickly to point out that doctor’s salaries are rising.
The first is from https://weatherbyhealthcare.com/blog/physician-salary-2017, and states:
"Physician Salary 2017 — Physician incomes have steadily increased for the seventh year in a row — from $206,000 in 2011 to $294,000 in 2017 — according to Medscape’s 2017 Physician Compensation Report, which comprises responses from more than 19,200 physicians in some 27 specialties.
And the pay gap between the incomes of specialists and primary care providers — $316,000 versus $217,000, respectively — has remained a steady at 45% since 2015, when specialists earned $284,000 and primary care providers earned $195,000."
While this site:
Shows the salary ranges of doctors in 1996 to be 100,000 to 175,000.
Of course everyone has their own individual circumstances and no doubt some individual physicians are earning less.
But the first link of self-reporting physicians (perhaps a self-selecting group just of physicians with increased earnings) shows a 44% increase in doctor pay, on average from 2011 to 2017.
grain of salt fwiw two cents whatever caveats here apply . . .
i think it really depends on which doctors you look at. a lot of specialists do better, but i think most Primary Care docs would be able to disagree with you. I’m not an MD, but as an optometrist I can tell you its harder and harder for us to increase income.
Thanks for the input. I hope you get some relief in terms of working ease.
And, as the rich in this country get richer while the middle class continues to shrink, the price of wines should decrease because even the rich folks need only so much wine.
The 2014 Bdx. thread (started by Victor, iirc) could carry a WineHunter subtitle.
It’s the exact same as what excited you, and what drove your passion, except the names are different. The “best” anyone experiences is not only subjective, but it’s also relative to one’s own experiences. If the “best” anyone has ever experienced is a $20 grocery store wine, and that wine was exciting and passion-provoking, then that’s their “same” experience. And if the price of that wine, and all other similar-quality wines, escalates to a price that is beyond their means, then they will suffer the same “moving backwards” depression that you have experienced.
I think this phenomenon, which I agree is real, really emphasizes the importance and accuracy of the frequently-given advice to buy the best you can afford as early on in your wine-buying “career” as you can; that way, you have the benefit of those purchases to rely on as the path on which you planned to move forward progresses at a more rapid pace than you are able to maintain. This is a lesson that took me a bit more than a decade to learn, yet I still find myself fighting the “enthusiast” habits I’ve picked-up along the way.
I really have to laugh / cry at those obstinate posters trying to disagree with Mark. Why are you picking a fight?!? Do you really not believe the OP?
“Oh but noobs don’t start wanting to collect 1er Bdx and Burgundy” - certainly all of the ones I know do. These are benchmark and highly desirable wines. I think often people get into wine precisely because they want to scale that mountain. And it’s become less accessible (and more excessible!) than ever.
“Oh but you don’t need to drink DRC” - yebbut many people would like to. When I was a lil’un I could get to the '95 and '96 vintage tasting of the whole range. There isn’t even a tasting anymore, even if I wanted to drop $1000 or more on it.
“Oh but what do you mean by ‘fine wine’ [explanation follows] you name dropper” - regardless of how you define it, the average price now is way more than inflation adjusted pricing in days yore.
I could understand if the arguments against were more along the lines of “what do you mean by ‘screwed’ because information is available much more readily than in the 60s” but yeesh.
Keep at it. Time will take care of this problem. 
We obviously know different people. The first five people I thought of when reading the quoted line don’t collect either Bdx or Burgundy. One does have a few bottles of Chablis but the others have none at all. Cellar size is small at under 500 bottles but each of them focuses on what they like and not what they think they should chase.
Your statement would be true for me when I started collecting back in the early 1990s. I thought I needed to chase the big names but even then many of them were unaffordable to me. I recall thinking about buying some Leroy Musigny after having been lucky enough to taste some at a pre-auction tasting but even at the then much lower prices, the cost of a bottle still exceeded 1% of my meager yearly salary.
I agree with Mark, and appreciate the follow-up sentiments from Subu, Vincent and Dan.
I don’t really get the debate in this thread though as both of the following two statements ring true for me:
- The finest rare wines in the world are increasingly expensive and unattainable.
- The availability and quality of fine wine has never been greater.
Statement 1 is a bummer as the top wines from the top producers (most acute in Burgundy but also true for the very top producers in Bordeaux, Rhone and Piedmont) will only become more and more expensive as ultra-wealthy collectors pursue wine as a hobby. While this is a bummer, it’s not more than that for me. I’ll get to taste these benchmarks as a rare treat from friends or as a splurge purchase.
Statement 2 is cause for great optimism. Subu did a nice job of outlining the underlying factors here. There is no shortage of exceptional and attainable wines, even in Grand Cru Burgundy, Bordeaux and Piedmont. Plenty of pleasure as a drinker and collector to be had in the wine world.