Burgundy why bother ?

Simply not on my radar anymore, when even a modest village wine costs what will buy a top wine from so many places. In fact I've almost even forgotten about its existence;)
 
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Not in the same league at all but I find myself struggling to drink some of the wines in my fairly modest cellar simply because I often look at some of the bottles worth in the region of £50 or more and thinking that it doesn't seem right to drink on my own.

My wife isn't much of a wine drinker and certainly not reds, so I would often be drinking the bottle mostly myself. It's different when we have company but that's not a weekly occurrence.

I do tend to turn to wines in the £20-30 region for more every day drinking and will happily open one of those at any occasion so perhaps it really is the cost which is a barrier for me. Does anyone else have that sort of issue? Maybe I just need to get over myself and drink more of this sort of wine!
 
Yes.
Chris Welsh said:
Not in the same league at all but I find myself struggling to drink some of the wines in my fairly modest cellar simply because I often look at some of the bottles worth in the region of £50 or more and thinking that it doesn't seem right to drink on my own.

My wife isn't much of a wine drinker and certainly not reds, so I would often be drinking the bottle mostly myself. It's different when we have company but that's not a weekly occurrence.

I do tend to turn to wines in the £20-30 region for more every day drinking and will happily open one of those at any occasion so perhaps it really is the cost which is a barrier for me. Does anyone else have that sort of issue? Maybe I just need to get over myself and drink more of this sort of wine!
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Yes! Have two Liebherr's full of wine for Offline and special occasions - struggle to take any of these out for mid week solo drinking.
 
Chris Welsh said:
I do tend to turn to wines in the £20-30 region for more every day drinking and will happily open one of those at any occasion so perhaps it really is the cost which is a barrier for me. Does anyone else have that sort of issue? Maybe I just need to get over myself and drink more of this sort of wine!
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It's kind of strange, but I find that more expensive wine only really shines when you taste it against something cheaper. I've found plenty of wines under a tenner which give more than enough drinking pleasure as long as you don't go tasting something premium the same evening.
 
As far as I'm concerned I really have enough wine in the cellar and in storage that there's no point in selling the top end bottles in order to buy other wines in larger quantities, so for the moment I'm holding on to them and bringing them out as appropriate - I didn't buy them with the intention of making a profit, just to drink something I might not be able to afford at current prices. None of the bottles have reached four figure price tags, anyway...
Since some of the most sublime vinous experiences I've had - including the bottle which got me started - were from Burgundy I did have the idea in mind that when my mortgage was paid off and I had a bit more money I would buy a mixed case from DRC - including Romanee-Conti - to see whether it really was that special; what of course happened was that I realised I'd need a new mortgage to afford it!
Unlike Tom I didn't reject the Rousseau Chambertin at £450 for 6 - I just failed to put my order in in time, which had the same effect...
 
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That's true
Mark Temple said:
Simply on my radar anymore, when even a modest village wine costs what will buy a top wine from so many places. In fact I've almost even forgotten about its existence;)
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Now this is something I can strongly disagree with in terms of my own experience. There are plenty of village wines at around the £15-£20 that give me enormous pleasure. I think that much of this pleasure is derived by association with the knowledge of what these wines are little versions of. So I can understand that many (most?) drinkers would not enjoy them, I do! ;-)
 
Barry Smith said:
It's kind of strange, but I find that more expensive wine only really shines when you taste it against something cheaper. I've found plenty of wines under a tenner which give more than enough drinking pleasure as long as you don't go tasting something premium the same evening.
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Now that is a proposition which requires a great deal of thought!
 
Burgundy prices have certainly risen stratospherically at the top end and fairly steeply across the board.
I won't be giving up on the region entirely however and good wines can still be bought at prices which aren't prohibitive. I realise that such things are subjective but I find
2010 Fixin, Clos de la Perrière, 1er Cru, Domaine Joliet a decent shout at sub £30 all in.
 
I just browsed London merchants today and found red villages for less than 20£, some Volnay 1ercru from reputed producer for 30£ and some grand crru for 60£ all VAT and duty included... Tookme 30 minutes. Struggled not to buy but kept reasonable.
 
Thom Blach said:
Now that is a proposition which requires a great deal of thought!
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Oh, we could open up a huge can of worms here (if you have a lot of expensive wine you may not want to read on). There are certainly studies which suggest that cheaper wines are often preferred in blind tastings, e.g. Ashton, R.H. (2014):

Four blind tastings of 2006 red Bordeaux and 2009 white Burgundy with a price range of $20–$119 were conducted, in which members of a wine club rated their extent of enjoyment of each wine. In three of the tastings, there was no relationship between price and enjoyment, while in the other the relationship was negative, lending additional credibility to the contention that an important segment of wine consumers do not find enjoyment to increase with price.​

.. based on a previous study by Goldstein (2008):

Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.​

The better news is that these effects don't seem to apply so strongly to particularly educated wine consumers, who do indeed prefer more expensive wines (see Goldstein). However, there does still seem to be evidence for the (probably unsurprising) finding that producer reputation has more influence on the price than the actual quality of the wine (Oczkowski, 2001) and, as always, you are more likely to rate a wine as high quality if you already know it's expensive (Veale, 2008):

Analysis revealed price and country of origin were both stronger contributors to perceptions of wine quality than taste, irrespective of knowledge [...] The research clearly demonstrates that consumer belief in the price/value schema dominates quality assessment for consumers.​

I'm not sure what to take away from a lot of this. I certainly think I prefer some more expensive wines (though it's far from a linear price/enjoyment relationship). However, I think I can often enjoy a cheaper wine just as much - if I can perhaps ignore the fact that its flavours are those associated with cheaper wines.
 
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Edward Bolland said:
Burgundy prices have certainly risen stratospherically at the top end and fairly steeply across the board.
I won't be giving up on the region entirely however and good wines can still be bought at prices which aren't prohibitive. I realise that such things are subjective but I find
2010 Fixin, Clos de la Perrière, 1er Cru, Domaine Joliet a decent shout at sub £30 all in.
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I managed to pick up the '11 & '11 for about the same.
There is no need to rush the '10.
 
Barry Smith said:
There are certainly studies which suggest that cheaper wines are often preferred in blind tastings, e.g. Ashton, R.H. (2014):
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Barry Smith said:
The better news is that these effects don't seem to apply so strongly to particularly educated wine consumers, who do indeed prefer more expensive wines (see Goldstein).
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Indeed. If you do a search back, you'll find quite an extended discussion that we had on this very subject. It may have been on the old board though.

But I think there was general agreement that if you have an untutored palate, the most cost-effective thing to do is to avoid educating it. There seems to be a tipping point at which you "get" the idea of better wines, if I can put it that way. Once past this point, you cannot unlearn what you have learned, though it does help you appreciate more points in lesser wines I guess.
 
Definitely not buying as much Burgundy as I used to and when I do I tend to buy directly from the region.

Still saying that sometimes you can pick up a bargain in the UK; a recent auction purchase of 9 bottles of Sylvie Esmonin Gevrey Chambertin Vieilles Vignes 2007 worked out all in at just over £25 a bottle which I was very happy with. That's one of the wines for Christmas Day sorted.
 
Ian Black said:
Indeed. If you do a search back, you'll find quite an extended discussion that we had on this very subject. It may have been on the old board though.

But I think there was general agreement that if you have an untutored palate, the most cost-effective thing to do is to avoid educating it. There seems to be a tipping point at which you "get" the idea of better wines, if I can put it that way. Once past this point, you cannot unlearn what you have learned, though it does help you appreciate more points in lesser wines I guess.
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Top wines may require more evolution to show their stuff, whereas cheaper wines tend to be produced in volume and therefore produced in a style that encourages immediate consumption. Not sure those tastings factored any of that in.
 
Ashton, R.H. (2014) "test the robustness of Goldstein et al.,'s (2008) finding that, in blind tastings, average wine drinkers consider less expensive wines to taste better than more expensive wines." and Goldstein (2008) tests non-expert wine consumers.

Veale, 2008 states "results show that marketers cannot assume that intrinsic product attributes, even when experienced, will be weighted and interpreted accurately by consumers – even those considered “knowledgeable”". However "results from the objective knowledge test shows respondents achieved a mean score of only 4.71 correct answers out of the 14 multiple choice questions, with 91% of respondents scoring 7 correct answers or less". Hence "knowledgeable" people don't really know much

If you taste with most people in this forum and above all with most recently made MWs or WSET Diploma's student, nailing quality is absolutely essential to pass. Once you are trained (a looooooooooot I may add) it is very difficult to misjudge it (in a commercial/price context rather than a purely edonistic one). Or at least this is my experience.
 
Sad for him and for you Tom as it seems you taught him to appreciate fine wine. Clearly, you would be better off if he could guzzle up some plonk from Asda and you would have more cash to satisfy your weakness;)
 
Steven Pritchard said:
Top wines may require more evolution to show their stuff, whereas cheaper wines tend to be produced in volume and therefore produced in a style that encourages immediate consumption. Not sure those tastings factored any of that in.
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Good point - I'm not sure either.

But I hope part of educating a palate would involve understanding that some wines call for cellar time, and that a wine like that drunk too early may be in a suboptimal condition. But the question was on preferences, and I'm pretty sure I too would vote for a cheaper, lower rank Burgundy or a New World PN that was accessible, rather than a firmly shut GC. To do otherwise would be to score the label rather than the wine.
 
Ian Black said:
Good point - I'm not sure either.

But I hope part of educating a palate would involve understanding that some wines call for cellar time, and that a wine like that drunk too early may be in a suboptimal condition. But the question was on preferences, and I'm pretty sure I too would vote for a cheaper, lower rank Burgundy or a New World PN that was accessible, rather than a firmly shut GC. To do otherwise would be to score the label rather than the wine.
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Precisely!
 
I agree with Bill - my Burgundy is for drinking, and I think I can justify a couple of hundred pounds/ euros a bottle for an incredible wine if I choose to splash out on a few of the grander 2015s. In my book it's the purchase price of Burgundy that I log, not the secondary market potential value.

By way of example, I had my first bottle of Engel Brulées 2002 out a 12 pack recently that I brought along to an Engel vertical at Noble Rot earlier this year, along with the last bottle of its 1999 namesake, both bought from Jasper back in the day, and in the company of various of Engel's GCs from 1993 to 2002. These are two of the greatest wines I've ever enjoyed, of any rank. And those bottles got me free entrance into the company of other Engel lovers that otherwise wouldn't have been possible: priceless, surely? And the great news is the 2002 Brulées has got ages to go. The fact that Seckford is offering it for sale for £5,000 per dozen is a bit of shock. But there isn't any question that I shall drink all mine over the next 15 years, £400 a bottle or not. I paid £23 for mine, and that's the price in my head. Like all my Burgundy, they are not to be traded at any price.
 
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