So before this they made crap?

WINE TALK
1

I’m going to shoot off a couple of different ideas in a couple of different posts…

My first question is that before 00’, did all wine regions, for the most part only make crap? I ask this because it seems that the slant from every critic, reviewer, taster, lover of wine has said that wine, overall is better than it was 20-30 years ago.

I’m 38 and have been drinking wine seriously for about 20 years (yes, seems weird but 20 years) and have seen many trends and tasted a bunch of wine in my life and can honestly say that wine has gotten no better/worse than it was 20 years ago.

I’ve seen, pay per acre, pay per ton, 2x2, 4x4, bush vine, head trained, guyot, cordon, double cordon, single berry select, sorting tables, laser sorters, bladder presses, rotary fermenters, warm ferments, cold ferments, whole cluster, non oxygen, gravity flow, new oak, neutral oak, oak chips, acidification…I could go on… All for the sake of making better wine, but has it… How about those 80’s UC Davis failures or those flawed corks from the late 90’s, early 00’s. How about the huge amount of mid 00’s over extractions? Current Quilceda Creek anyone?

And with everything I have seen and tasted, I have to say that I am still thinking about a 55’ Cheval Blanc or so many examples of 80’s Cali wines that I would place in my top 20 wines of all time.

With all of the tasting notes on here about wines from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s which decade (era) has (have) made the biggest qualitative jump? 70’s to the 80’s? 90’s to the 00’s? Which region you ask? Use any of the big one’s, Burg, BDX, Cali, Piedmont, Tuscany, Rhone, Champagne, Germany???

I would posit that none have.

Now, how about the second tier… Oregon, Washington, New York, Argentina, Ribera del Duero, Rioja, Bierzo, Monstant, (ok, anything either Eric Solomon or Jorge Ordonez brings in from Spain), Umbria, Lazzio, (Ok Anything Leo Loccasio brings in from obscure regions in Italy), Chablis, Bojo, Jura, Bandol, Australia, ect., ect.,
This, now this is where wine has improved…OK, not necessarily the quality of the wines, but the fact the wines are now actually imported into American markets, giving greater selection, competition, pushing out the lesser wines.

I would say that the only truth is that in every price tier, wine has become more intense in flavor and alcohol, not necessarily better.
There is more physical inventory today then there was 20 years ago which leads to greater competition, which ultimately leads to better overall quality, or so it would seem… There is still a lot of crappy wine out there, but with out a doubt, overall (meaning every price tier) todays wine is generally more approachable and more readily available then it has been in previous years, making the overall selection better, but I wouldn’t say the wines so much…

What say you old timers that can remember Stag’s leap SLV or old Mayacamus, remember 12.5%…

Are wines that much better then they were in the 80’s?

2

Yes. In the 1980s there were like 6 wineries in RdD, today there are hundreds. Same in Toro and many other places in Spain. Franco died in the early 1970s, people had to wake up, figure out what was going on, replant, etc., and learn, so the wines have most assuredly improved from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Same in much of Italy. And actually, same in much of France.

Many growers in Spain, and even Italy and France sold their wine to co-ops. So yes, they made a lot of crap. In Middle and Eastern Europe, they were under the Soviet jackboot, so most assuredly they made crap. Places that nobody in the US ever heard of were putting out wine, but nothing that you’d want to drink. I’ve been drinking wine a little longer than you but remember going to Europe in 1990 when the Soviets were failing and the wine in many countries was horrid, whereas today they’ve imported new technology and know-how and they’re making good wine.

Washington? Columbia Crest started putting out wine in the early 1980s. Today there are people from all over the world making wine there. It’s hard to compare wine from today with wine that didn’t even exist in the 1980s.

Same in much of California. Look at all the wineries that started in the 1970s - those are the “old guard” of Napa. So thera were wineries that made good to great wine, some still producing good to great wine, but there are also many wineries that didn’t exist, in areas that had either never produced anything good or had fallen into second-rate status but that are now producing good to great wine.

Doesn’t mean that Cheval Blanc made crap in the 1970s and is now recovered, but that is in fact true for some producers. And for others, they’re recent arrivals.

3

Very interesting set of questions and, for me, a simple response: Yes, they made a lot of crap. I can really only speak knowledgeably on the two regions I know best, Alsace (where I live) and Burgundy (where my heart lives).

For me the reasons are two-fold:

  1. The market accepted it.
  2. The old guard was still in charge. The change of generations that occurred in the mid-'80s was paradigm-altering, in that the younger generation had much broader world views and and a greater appreciation for their vinous patrimony than (many of their) parents had. They had travelled and tasted widely; their parents had not.

Along with the change in generation came new technologies and vineyard practices (many of which you cite) that allowed for delicious wines even in more difficult vintages.

Don’t get me wrong, however. There have always been wonderful wines made by serious, dedicated winegrowers, just as today there is still plenty of crap sloshing around. But on average, the percentages have changed, meaning that for us consumers, there is much more of the former and less of the latter.

My 2 cents’…

4

I would say it’s inarguable that winemaking is better today than it was 20-30 years ago, at least speaking from an Italian perspective, which is the bulk of my red wine buying. First, there is the beneficial impact of global warming itself - in an area like Piemonte, even if a producer has done nothing else regarding his handling of the grapes, climate gives him better raw materials to work with now in more vintages than it did 30 years ago.

In addition, the increase in prices per bottle has allowed the farmers/producers to reinvest more proceeds into improvements in the hygiene of cellars. And the same increase in prices has attracted more producers, and has caused existing producers to focus more on quality - 20 or 30 years ago, producers like Brovia were not making the same quality of wine they are producing today.

To me, the only real question is whether the wines still possess that almost legendary ability to age and develop. For example, will the '99 Monfortino ever be the qualitative equal of the legendary '78? Is the 2001 Giacosa Le Rocche going to be one of the all-time great red labels? But other than that one issue, I personally don’t think there is any argument regarding the pervasive/broad-based improvement in the overall quality and quantity of good wines produced in areas like Barolo & Tuscany.

5

The oringal post ignores vintage quality which may transcend winemaking skill.

6

Overall, if one were to plot wine quality (however that gets defined) on a bell curve, 20-30 years ago, the curve may be flatter and more spread out. Today, the curve is likely taller, narrower, and the entire curve has likely shifted to the right.

7

I would posit that we really do not know.

While I have a bias against some of these wines and vintages you highlight, we really are only making educated guesses that can easily turn out to be wrong. Assuming you had the '55 Cheval when you were 18, you were drinking a top-tier Bordeaux with 39 years of maturity on it. Some vintages with or close to that level of maturity are '75 and '82. The former was criticized for being brutally tannic and hard, the latter as being the exact opposite with concerns about its ability to mature. I’ve recently, say last 5 years, had some wonderful wines from both vintages. Hard to compare new releases with that '55 Cheval given the extreme differences in maturity.

Noble Rot had a nice article recently about critics comparing wines from X vintage to new releases from Y vintages, for example, RP saying this 2010 Petrus drinks just like the '59, a legend in the making, which of course does not account at all to his or any critic’s palate having changed over the last 25, 35, or so years. Or as the article highlights, that their palate may be dead of old age.

I wonder, too, whether any of the new releases in some of the regions we value for the ability to mature really will ever reach the heights of some of or epiphany wines, or wines that have stuck in our senses. What I can say over the last 20 years of my similar wine appreciation, is that the breadth of available wine in a high quality range has grown exponentially. So many different regions producing such an incredible range of very quality wines at affordable prices. I have always been a Chinon fan, but in the '80s and even '90s the vintages were quite variable, and what the winemakers did back then did not seem to overcome that variability. Now, whether it is less variability in weather, better winemaking, better farming, or whatever, and I’m buying Chinons from many back-to-back vintages.

Nice OP!

8

Yes, but I think this helps to make the point that winemaking is better than it was. In the good/great vintages there are many more quality producers to take advantage of it (and making a broad range of styles, so no complaining that it’s all just spoofed up juice neener ), plus I find in the lesser vintages the drop-off in quality isn’t as extreme because of measures taken in the vineyard and winery to help rescue the final product.

9

Certainly Chilean wine has gotten better…?

10

Great question and as others have posited, not an easy one to answer.

There is no doubt that we have more information available to us both as consumers and producers than ever before,. We have more ‘science’ as grape growers and winemakers to review and utilize as we’d like to try to make the ‘best’ wines possible. As the OP pointed out, some of these changes have had positive effects seemingly, and some have gone the opposite way.

There is no doubt that one thing that has benefited us with domestic producers is the willingness and wantingness to go with others chose not to in the past - extreme Sonoma Coast, planting varieties in places that many said ‘would not work’. Would this have happened 3 or 4 decades ago? It did, but to a much smaller scale.

I think it’s an exciting time on both sides of the table, but it’s impossible to say how the wines of today will ‘measure up’ to the wines that are put on pedestals from yesteryear. In some ways, I’m okay with that - to me, it’s always a challenge to compare ‘modern’ versus ‘classic’ in an ‘apples to apples’ kind of way . . .

Cheers!

11

As a good AFWE example of this, the 2012 German and Austrian rieslings under screwcap bear no resemblance to the Rieslings which I cut my teeth on, back in the day, and the 2012 Donnhoff Estate under screwcap is so intense that it’s at the very far edge of what I can keep in my mouth without spitting it back out.

The big unanswered question is how they will age - what will they eventually turn into and how long will it take them to get there?

Sadly, any time you vary the initial parameters of a complex system, you have to run your Monte Carlo routine to get your empiricals, and the only way to run a Monte Carlo routine on an insanely complicated system like a bottle of wine is to put it in your cellar and wait.

And then cross your fingers and hope while you’re waiting. And hope. And hope so more.

12

This. I would also add that the entire population is larger so one will find more examples of excellent wines. Though there may be no more “wines of a lifetime”. In all ages there are fantastic vintages which control and turn out classic wines regardless. I think that for a number of reasons that people have stated wine is definitely better. More technology, more agricultural studies, and more purchase money in the market allowing for more careful winemaking and investment in all avenues. Perhaps this is seen more in lesser wines and vintages.

I think this obvious in a couple of examples the o.p. questions. To me there are no more “lifetime” cabs or bordeauxs than there were 20+ years ago. But there are a lot more good and very good wines. Of course this is complicated in the case of an AFWE because their stylistic preference is nowhere near as popular as it was decades back. So some people are not going to like a wine (eg Shafer Hillside) even though it is made with extreme care and investment and the majority of people love it. So to some extent ones comparison of winemaking heights is going to track their preferences as related to what style is popular. There are some great examples of classic cab from pre-80. But some people seem to forget how much crappy cab was made back then. There’s a segment that stylistically probably prefers the middle of the curve wines from then to that segment now, but the majority of the marketplace wouldn’t.

13

I had the pleasure of participating in a discussion with some folks who run wine stores (and have run them a long time) that cater to relatively informed buyers. These are folks that are tasting 40 - 50 wines a week or more trying to decide what to stock and what their clients might like. They generally agreed that the massive change from 20+ years ago is that there are so many fewer truly bad wines that are being offered to them. In other words, the bottom of the quality curve has come way up.

I’ve been asking wine makers about this quality rise, and they generally seem to say that the rise of easing info sharing on the Internet globally in the last 15 years or so has made it hugely easier to learn best practices. Not to mention the ubiquity of wine reviews and discussions.

Does that mean wine is better?

The impossible challenge about comparing overall goodness of wine from now vs. wine from 20 years ago is the unreliable nature of subjective human taste and memory.

This thread is fun and interesting, but I’d be very curious if anyone had actual facts/data beyond human subjective taste to answer these questions.

14

Nice succinct summary! Couldn’t agree more.

15

Well there certainly has been a major rise in Europe of the grower/winemaker, where in the past the grower would have merely sold their crop to an uncaring co-op or negociant. It’s difficult to argue against that being a positive move, albeit it should be noted the grower/winemaker now makes more money and we pay extra for that quality.

There are plenty of industrial wineries who perhaps make a different type of shit now. Greater manipulation, more polish, but it’s still a turd. In some respects one wonders whether the old shit was better?

At the middle-top end I’m less convinced. Rising alc%s became a problem for table wine, and the pressure to make wines softer and more appealing on release may seriously harm their age-ability. Oak has in some instances become a flavouring, rather than simple storage / a way to stabilise a wine / a subtle influence. It is interesting how some old-fashioned methods of viticulture have been rediscovered and sometimes have shown better results than the modern textbook approaches.

Better understanding of winery/barrel hygiene however has generally been a good influence

There are however more quality producers than ever before, but I’m not convinced the overall quality is better - indeed I’d probably argue the reverse. i.e. slightly worse, but much more choice. Note though that these are stylistic preferences and I’m sure Robert Parker would vehemently disagree with me.

Finally there are areas that break the mould. Chianti without the compulsory white varieties is IMO an obvious improvement, as is allowing sangiovese ‘in purezza’. Other areas were so bad, but investment (sometimes via EU) has transformed them. One or two have become reliant on tourism or a captive local audience, and have fallen backwards - though perhaps more true of individual producers than whole regions.

regards
Ian

16

Definitely the quantity of good wine, the number of producers making good wine, and the ability to make good on poor vintages is all much higher today. That doesn’t mean everything back then was crap, but buying a random wine back then was more of a crap-shoot.

The the point about '55 Cheval Blanc however leads to a different question - are the best wines today better than the best wines of days past? The temptation is to say “no,” but I think it’s because the 100 point scale teaches us that there’s an upper limit in wine quality that can be achieved but not surpassed. …but that’s a different argument [berserker.gif]

I believe wines today are more built to be drunk young. There’s a good reason for this - most wine consumers nowadays drink wine younger. Unless you inherit a cellar, there’s no way around it. As wine becomes more popular, there are more and more drinkers who don’t have decades to wait for their wine. It’s possible that structuring wines this way may lead them to not age out as gracefully. If it’s the case that the really magical experiences with wine only occur with aging, then it follows that we’ve forgone those experiences for quicker gratification. This is something, however, that we’ll need time to tell.

17

Years ago, I recall being taught that there were “restaurant” vintages, which were the early drinking years and then there were the collector vintages, which were the wines that could be tough if consumed early and were meant for cellaring and aging.

I don’t see these references very often, if at all, anymore.

Clearly, great wine was being made before the 80’s.

I suspect that with the Information Age, consultants, “corrections”, and the onset of wine writers only too happy to spell out the formula for higher scores, wine makers have way more access to information and tactics to avoid making wine that won’t be accepted by the marketplace.

So, the tallest poppies haven’t grown any taller, they just have more company, differences between vintages and producers from top to bottom have been reduced, we can’t be sure what has been lost in this process, but I suppose the gain is that there is more competently made wine.

IMO, The phenomena of wine growers discontinuing the practice of selling off grapes in order to make their own wine is a separate phenomenon. Since those growers previously did not make their own wine, their wine-making could not have changed. To the extent that good grapes were removed from large blends in order for growers to make their own dine, it stands to reason that those large blends would either suffer or struggle to stay the same.

The growers themselves did not make better wine, they simply started making wine.

If we want to include this phenomena, I’m okay with that, but I think it should be separated out and considered on its own.

There certainly is more wine and more that can be drunk without cellaring, but these used to be considered the lesser wines. In this case, it isn’t necessarily the wine that has changed, it’s the perception.

18

I’m new to wine, but what I’ve been hearing here in UT stores is that you can get a pretty tasty wine in the under $20 range easy.

Cheers!

19

Truly a great question!

I would suggest from many winemaker conversations, that all the technological “advances” (for lack of a better word) have allowed for much more consistent quality across the board.

However, applied to a vintage like '55, it is quite possible (although certainly debatable) we may never witness a Cheval Blanc of such greatness. The technological prowess we now possess allows quality wine to be made in pretty much every vintage. This was certainly not the case in '55, as many lackluster wines were produced in Bordeaux that year, both left and right bank. Back in '55, compared to now, producers were living much more on the edge, almost without knowing it.

Solely based on conversations with winemakers who were around in '55 (and on or about) general quality of young wines has certainly increased, but the trade off is the “play it safe” approach technology provides. Truly great wine, probably, has never been made by “playing it safe”, and it is an easy trap to fall into for the producer.

Taylor
ITB

20

Thank you for all the thoughtfully written responses.

I am a person who cellars wine, mainly to see what happens with time in the bottle. I believe that magic happens with time and that the true personality comes out with age. I have had many (3000+ bottles) of aged (20-100 years) and what I have learned is that each wine has a story to tell, good, bad, indifferent, but you do get to see their personality.

I used the 55’ Cheval analogy (maybe fair, maybe extreme) as a wine that really struck me, it hit every chord, it was harmonious and special and for better or worse, it’s what I judge greatness by (at least wine-wise). Not every wine is a benchmark wine, but any wine can become a benchmark.

But to me, the question I asked which Greg T answered very astutely, was that of course there are many more really good wineries today then there were 30 years ago, and of course the wine wasn’t crap.

So let me further the conversation, if the wines weren’t crap 30 years ago (and maybe even pretty good to benchmark), how come every major critic recognizes that wines have changed that much?

I really enjoy the tone of this thread so please don’t let this devolve.
But if the overall ceiling of quality wine has pretty much hit it’s peak and been there for years, what’s left?
And better yet, where is wine going to go?