In my red burg collection I’m at 20% GC, 60% 1er, 18% village, 2% Bourgogne.
I’m trying to figure out why. Honestly I think it’s mostly a price point, or QPR thing, with my taste and wallet hitting on 1ers as generally in a sweet spot. I’ve gone through cycles of buying some Bourgogne and village wines, thinking of them as near(er) term drinkers. When I open them (as I recently opened some ‘14 Mugneret Gibourg and Groffier) I find myself very pleased. Cheaper and simpler bottles, for sure, but still real Burgundy experiences to my taste.
Same with Grand Crus (kind of random buying cycles). I try to encourage myself to buy them, but get stuck on the price points. End up with some impulse buys, or deal snaggage. I don’t regret any of those buys, but they’re not as consistent or planned out as most of my regular purchases. And I do tend to open them as special occasion bottles or with groups/tastings. But I try not to be too finicky and enjoy GCs whenever the mood strikes.
majority is 1er…the sweet spot in terms of the most appropriate wine for when i want to drink a good wine. i always feel like grand cru is meant for a special occasion…mostly due to price but also sometimes they are a bit more rich than id like to drink on a typical weekend night out with my wife and kid.
i have been veering away from village wines…particularly expensive ones. i used to rep them because they offered the best way to experience a solid producer but prices have crept up so much, i feel like just spending the extra $ to go to 1er.
bourgogne…i tend to buy and drink rather quickly. i put them in my daily drinker camp because i dont overpay for bourgogne. i find a good bottle for a good price and drink it. i absolutely fell in love with olivier merlin cras bourgogne rouge recently when i picked up bottles of 2019 for $15/each. if i can just drink that forever for that price, i wouldnt really mind.
Interesting. I’m not sure I ever did the calculation that way. I’m at about 35% GC, 40% 1er, 15% Village, and 10% bourgogne. We usually open burgundy at wine dinners with other collectors, when I make a nice meal on a weekend, or corkage at a local restaurant. So I feel that for all those occasions, I need a GC or a premier cru. I actually switched from buying bourgogne as “daily drinkers” a few years ago because I was finding we just didnt drink them, and I think that older village burgundies are appropriate to take to a restaurant or have with a nice dinner, wheras I wouldn’t do that with a base bourgogne.
I drink Bourgogne, but never cellar it as most of my wine is in offsite storage and that space is too valuable for a basic Bourgogne.
Grand Cru might be a smidge higher if I get to count Fourrier CSJ as I have a decent amount of that wine. I’ve spent my first 4 - 5 years stocking up on a decent baseline of Village and 1er Crus. I drink a lot of young Village wines, but now that I have started to accumulate some aged Village wines I am buying smaller quantities of Village wines on release and transitioning that budget to back filling Grand Crus sparingly. My goal is to purchase more Grand Crus over the next few years, and eventually I’d like to be at something like 25% Grand Cru, 50% 1er Cru, 25% Village.
I’m strangely close to 25% each. But every single bottle of Grand Cru I own is one of the Cortons, because I bought them when pricing had not yet reached insane (for me) levels. Moving forward I expect to buy more village ‘lieux dits’. I simply don’t need to keep spending the kind of money it takes to buy upper level Burgs.
Why? No idea, other than it’s quite random based on what I could afford at the exact moment of purchase. Bourgogne is weighted a little more heavily than it would be due to a period where I was able to buy a fair bit of Mugneret-Gibourg Bourgogne, which I absolutely adore.
So much this way for me as well. I really like the M-G Bourgogne but only ever purchased 2 bottles of the ‘14. A few reasons but at the time the price difference between this and the NSG 1ers was relatively small.
But the random element was very powerful. My source for M-G would make offers, I would make requests, then I would get some random subset of my requests. Eventually I realized that I would nearly always get the lowest level bottles I asked for. I.e. if I asked for 2 Bourgogne, 2 Village, and 2 NSG 1ers, I might get the 2 Bourgogne and a village. So I learned to try to game the system by asking for higher level bottles. But the result was still very random.
The brick & mortar shop where I got 80% of my M-G had five people in line for their constantly dwindling allocation. I was number 5 in the list, but I was also the only one who really cared about the Bourgogne and Vosne Village. So that’s the majority of what I got. Got a few 1er and GC, plus a bit from a second source, but I am very happy with the stash of lower level wines, as they consistently outperform their level.
Early on in my journey I was much heavier on GCs, thinking: budget, smudget I must have the best! But then I realized if I waited 15+ years to open a bottle I would have some long thirsty times. Oh, and the credit card bills started adding up so I found new wisdom in balance.
so I found new wisdom in balance.