Koch alleges that five bottles he purchased through Acker Merrall & Condit were fake. The bottles were: 1947 Château Pétrus, a bottle of 1945 Comte Georges de Vogüé Musigny Cuvée Vielles Vignes, 1949 Lafleur, and two bottles of 1934 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Koch paid Acker $77,925 for the five bottles, purchased through private sales and auctions. He now claims they all came from Kurianwan but that source was not stated at the time of purchase.

Koch maintains that Kurniawan was the source of two Acker auctions in 2006 hailed only as from “THE cellar.” The two auctions grossed over $35 million. The complaint points to this LA Times profile of Kurniawan, which describes his preferred wardrobe is jeans and gray tshrits but that he has a Bentely and a Ferrari. The article also says that he got into wine only in the year 2000 but had already amassed a cellar of 50,000 bottles and that, “Since he started buying, prices for rare wine have skyrocketed.”

In reference to the two 2006 auctions, the filing says, “Buying and selling the same wine at the same time could also be an effort to manipulate wine prices, a scheme to pump up the price and then dump wine into the inflated market.”

Koch’s filing also states that Kurniawan owed Acker and Acker clients $10.4 million as of a November 2008 court proceeding. Acker accepted fine art and wine as collateral. Emigrant Bank also lent Kurniawan $3 million, according to the filing, and sued Kurniawan to get it back.

The filing also elaborates on sales of magnums of 1982 Le Pin and 122 bottles of red Burgundy from Domaine Ponsot. However, both sets of wines were withdrawn after winery principals raised doubts about the authenticity of the wines. Jancis Robinson has since called Laurent Ponsot “Burgundy’s Sherlock Holmes.” But where Kruniawan got those bottles remains unknown.

And to think that the movie rights for The Bilionaire’s Vinegar have already been sold! Looks like they’d better get working on the sequel already…

SPIT: family relations
Gary Heck of Korbel has sued his daughter, Richie Ann Samii, for defamation in postings on Craigslist. She denies the allegations in the Sonoma Press Democrat. The two are also involved in legal maneuverings over a multimillion dollar stake in the company.

SIPPED: fraud
Why do the empty wine bottles that fetch the highest prices on eBay correlate with those that are the most expensive and presumably authentic when full? An academic study (in progress) suggests counterfeiting. [Freakonomics]

SPIT: fraud
Researchers at the University of Bourgogne in Dijon have developed a way to track the barrels used for aging a wine: using a mass spectrometer. Each forest has an identifiable fingerprint for its lumber and that can be traced for 10 years after leaving the barrel. The researchers suggest that it could prevent fraud in wine, passing off a less expensive wine as a pricey one. But perhaps its best use might be to track whether the barrels came from the same pricey forest they claim to be from–or a low cost competitor. [New Scientist]

SIPPED: Wine paraphernalia on display
The Art Institute of Chicago has a two-month exhibit called “A Case for Wine: From King Tut to Today.” They describe the exhibit as the first of its kind at “tracing this beloved libation’s surprisingly significant role as a stimulus and source of artistic endeavor.”

SIPPED: red wine in the Tour
And if you were third overall in the Tour de France, what would you imbibe the evening before the rest day? Check out Lance Armstrong’s tweet for his answer: “Made it to Limoges…Gonna have dinner, drink a glass of red wine, talk to my kids, and crash out!!” Hopefully it was the real deal and not the powdered “wine.”

SIPPED: Bordeaux past
In a blast from what seems a distant past, a new investment fund for wine is opens this month with allegedly 15 to 20 million pounds of assets. Investors will need to meet the 500,000 pound minimum for the closed-end fund. Send checks to Richmond Park partners Steven Berger and Pascal Maeter who will manage the Lunzer Wine Investments Institutional Fund. [Bloomberg]

SIPPED: industrial waste over Givry
The Burgundy village of Givry has to contend with plans for a new industrial waste treatment plant on the outskirts of town. Last year’s mayoral campaign was fought largely around this issue with an anti-plant activist winning town hall. But the regional authorities later approved the plant, winemakers sued, and now a tribunal has suspended the approval. Score one for the winemakers! Check out the story at washingtonpost.com.

SPIT: excise tax
California’s legislature approved a new budget without increasing the excise tax on wine.

SIPPED and SPIT: wine blogs
The wine blog award winners have been announced. Alas, this blog is not among them. But thank you for your clicks of support! And hearty congratulations to the winners! [Fermentation]

SIPPED: insurance!
A “Master of Coffee” (not Mister Coffee) in England has insured his tongue for £10 million ($13.95 million) via Lloyd’s of London (not to be confused with the newly nationalized Lloyds Banking Group, ahem). Take that Robert Parker–his policy is 14 times bigger than your policy! [BBC via sdelong]

“I had one of those crazy wine experiences last week. Ancient bottle (1991) of Los Vascos can from Chile. Probably bought it in 93 when it was about $5. It got dragged from apt to apt through working cellars and non. Then dragged it up to Vermont where it happily sat in a downstairs closets probably fairly constantly at 55-65. Then hauled it out at Christmas, stuck it in a little snow to chill ever so slightly from the hot kitchen. Brought it in, never opened it, let it sit in the hot kitchen til last week. Opened it knowing that I had no right to expect anything but vinegar. it was delicious. What I didn’t drink, I baked into wine biscuits. Good story for the recession and in advance of Open That Bottle Night!”

Well, clearly I didn’t get this comment up before OTBN, which was this past Saturday. John Brecher and Dottie Gaiter of the WSJ created this tremendous, blog-style-before-there-were blogs interactive event, now in its tenth edition, to encourage people to open a special bottle that they had kept putting off opening. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in the cards for me to participate this past Saturday (had a cold); what did you uncork?

German Riesling
To my mind this is clearly the most singularly misunderstood and underappreciated region for great wines in the world. Even in their own country the wines are not really appreciated- most younger Germans interested in wine would prefer to drink pinot grigio. The strides made with dry rieslings by producers such as Klaus-Peter Keller and the like are helping the wines get a bit more of a hearing in Germany these days, but the traditional, off-dry styles are still wandering in the dessert looking for a fan base. And I really don’t understand why. The wines have everything- magical complexity, profound individuality, a brilliant ability to age gracefully and they are not expensive- what more could one ask for? They go great with the right kinds of food- Asian-inspired dishes, turkey or just hanging out with a cheese board after a tennis match. And yet, so many producers struggle to sell each year’s production through the pipeline, and really continue to make the wines as a labor of love. It makes me ill to think of a great producer such as Hanno Zilliken, crafting some of the most magical elixirs to be found on this gray earth, and he has as backlog of older vintages for sale that is simply unimaginable, while Michel Rolland marches through the world of wine like Sherman through Georgia, and everything he scars sells like hotcakes! I just don’t get it.

Austrian Riesling
I have a profound respect for the best producers of Austrian wines, but simply cannot drink the best examples anymore, as the wines are just too hot for my palate. I have had some absolutely magical bottles of Austrian wines, but all from older, pre-climate change vintages. As things stand now, I think Austria is one of the big losers in global warming, as the best wines these days are all over fourteen percent in top vintages, and no matter what they do, they cannot escape that uncovered alcohol on the finish. And I cannot think of any instance of a high alcohol white wine (and very, very few reds for that matter) that has aged gracefully. The lower tier wines are better, as they simply do not ripen as well, but the best sites are just not turning out great wines to my palate in the top vintages with the current viticultural and winemaking methodologies. And there is no way that one can make a lasting legacy of great wines hoping for “off vintages” and emphasizing the lower tier bottlings. I really think that the top Austrian winemakers have to start thinking about how they can reign in the ripeness in their top sites these days. Everything else is in place for greatness- brilliant terroir, old vines and a great tradition, but these have to be synthesized into the unfortunate new realities of global warming, and in my experience, the Austrians have still not made that leap. Don’t misunderstand me- there are still plenty of superb Austrian wines made year in and year out, but the crown jewels in terms of vineyards and bottlings have been way over-praised to my mind in the last decade, as the wines simply carry too much alcohol to ever meet with greatness.

Australian Riesling
Because of the Aussies’ love affair with screwcaps- particularly for their riesling bottlings- I really have not paid any attention in the last decade. In my opinion, the closure is fatally flawed as it is used today, and I find it inexcusable for so many winemakers and winery owners to try and sweep the flaws under the rug instead of ‘fessing up that they were screwed by the early propaganda and half-assed research- that the screwcap technology is still not ready to gracefully age wines- and switch back completely to corks until a time when the alternatives are really ready. Instead, we have all this “copper fining” BS- adding heavy metals to the wines so that they can use a flawed closure system is in my opinion just asinine and ethically bankrupt- and every other sort of winemaking manipulation ever conceived by man to try and get the wines ready to seal up under screwcap. Of course the jury is still out on whether or not adding huge doses of copper sulphate to the wines pre-bottling is safe for those consuming the wines, but I for one am not about to be the guinea pig on that score.

But beyond my rant on whether or not all these “treatments” (rather an Orwellian use of the word) that the Aussies put their wines through are safe, there is little doubt that copper finings and the like do strip out much of the character of the wines, and are still completely ineffectual and simply put off the day when the wines go into permanent reduction under screwcap and are ruined. How do you make a screwcap-sealed wine taste and smell like rotting cabbage or burning rubber- put it in the cellar for a few years. They almost all get there over time. But the damage starts faster than that- were you at the big Penfolds’ tasting here in New York a couple of months ago? Their 2007 Bin 51 Eden Valley Riesling was a perfect example of just how insidious screwcaps are for wine- this wine received 90 points from Josh Raynolds in his International Wine Cellar review in the September-October ’08 issue, and Josh has a great palate. By the time we tasted the wine at the end of October it was already obviously suffering from sulphate reduction- it was overtly mineral and borderline metallic on the palate, and about as short on the finish as a wine could be- classic reduction symptoms. About as classic an example of a 75 point wine as I have come across in some time. Now most wine drinkers would not recognize the symptoms of sulphate reduction in the wine- this was a journalist-only event and I did not hear many comments about the reduced aspects of the wine when it was served- and most would just assume that Penfolds cannot make riesling worth a damn.

So when the Aussies regain their senses and start using corks again- warts and all, and I am no great fan of TCA-tainted wines- not to mention all of the premature oxidation issues with recent vintages of my beloved white Burgundies, which in my opinion may well be cork-related- then I will start tasting Australian rieslings again in-depth. But really, what is the point of tasting a wine young that you strongly suspect is going to crash and burn quickly because of its closure? By the way, the 1999 Penfolds Eden Valley Riesling served at that same tasting from magnums (sealed with corks) was stellar, and shows that the potential for this grape is very high in Australia, but the whole wine industry down under (and New Zealand is every bit as large of an offender on this score) has got to deal with the screwcap issue first. Until that time I am not prepared to invest much time and even less money in what is going on down there.

The Loire
I have always loved the wines of the Loire Valley, and I fell in love with the region during my first visit back in 1989. It is a beautiful area of France and the wines have this wonderful, laid-back character that perfectly matches the bucolic settings and the people that live there. To my palate they have been one of the big winners with global warming- at least thus far- and the wines here have never been better than they are today. This is particularly true of the Loire Valley reds, which used to really struggle to ripen thoroughly. Back in the old days one or two good red wine vintages were all the vignerons were blessed with each decade, but now they are making good wines in almost every vintage, and great wines at least four or five times a decade. And for the most part these are classically made wines, without a lot of oak or micro-oxygenation or cryo-extraction- just unadulterated, classic French wines from great terroirs and noble grapes. Wines from people like Bernard Baudry, Pierre Breton, Clos Rougeard or Domaine Filliatreau are simply world class and cellar-worthy wines that compete well with anything out there on the market, and once again, they offer stunning value. But the Loire is close to Bordeaux, so you still occasionally find the proprietor who is trying to emulate what is going on these days in St. Emilion and tarts his or her wine up with a ton of unsupportable new oak and heavy extraction, but these are becoming fewer and further between, as more and more growers here embrace their own fine vinous heritage.

On the white wine front things in the Loire are equally exciting these days. Sancerre in particular is just overflowing with brilliant winemakers, and there are tons of great sauvignon blanc wines being made in less well-known places like Menetou-Salon and Quincy as well. Losing Didier Dagueneau at such a young age was a tragedy, but he did so much over the course of his life to inspire producers of sauvignon blanc-based wines to aim for the stars that his legacy will be with us for a very long time. And in chenin blanc country in the Touraine, this is a true renaissance, with legendary wines being made in Vouvray and Montlouis from the likes of Domaine Huet, François Chidaine, Domaine Foreau, François Pinon and a host of others. Savennières has several top estates making great dry chenin, and the back roads of the greater Touraine, Coteaux-du-Loir and Anjou regions are just raging with eccentric producers and their eclectic lineups that are pushing the envelope with grapes like gamay and pinot d’aunis in addition to making brilliant chenin-based wines. Producers like the Puzelat brothers, Eric Nicolas, Pascal Janvier, Olivier Lemasson, not to mention the indefatigable folks at Clos Roche Blanche are turning out so many stunning wines of character and breed that I cannot keep up with them all. And when you factor in what is going on in Muscadet with Domaine de la Pépière and Domaine Luneau-Papin- where they are making the most brilliant wines in the centuries-long history of the region- it really is the golden age of Loire Valley wines.

California cabs from the 70s
As Joni Mitchell once penned, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.” It is somewhat ironic that I have become one of the big proselytizers in regards to these wines from the 1970s, as I spent much of the latter half of my career in the wine trade selling wines other than Californian, and really had fallen out of the loop with what was going on in wine country on the west coast. Partly this was out of necessity, as my business was handling old and rare wines, and Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne, classic Piemonte and Rhônes were the core of my business in those days. But also, I had become quite disillusioned with the Helen Turley school of winemaking, with the excessive alcohol, residual sugar, heavy battering of the wines with a fusillade of new oak and commercial yeasts designed to give everything the same couple of flavors- which were adding up to my palate to boring, top-heavy wines without soul. By happenstance I was invited to an older California cabernet tasting a few years back- it was a remake of the famous 1976 Steven Spurrier tasting in Paris, so this must have been in 2001 during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the epic event- and I was really knocked out by a number of the California wines served at the tasting. I had cut my teeth on many of these wines in my formative days in the wine trade, and I was surprised that the wines had held up so well and were every bit as brilliant as I remembered them from back in the day.

A few years later at a friend’s fiftieth birthday, we were doing a “pot luck” tasting where everyone had to pull a great bottle or two for the occasion, and someone brought the 1974 Mayacamas cabernet- which was just magical. That was it, I was hooked again on these wines, and I have spent the better part of the last three years tasting and writing about them whenever possible. There are simply so many great, great wines still out there from this era that have aged brilliantly and simply tower over what is being produced today, and yet they have fallen out of fashion and most commentators cannot talk about them at all with any degree of intelligence. It is really sad, because wine, if anything, is an historical art form, and really has no meaning outside of its historical context. And yet, here you have this huge pool of brilliant wines from the decade of the 1970s, and the 1960s and 1950s before that, and very few people in the California wine trade can tell you anything about them. The same sort of modern myopia would be unthinkable in places like Burgundy, Bordeaux, Piemonte or the like, but in California it seems that it is perfectly acceptable to collectively turn their backs on their own winemaking heritage. I often wonder about this.

California cabs from the 2000s
Now you are into a realm where I am really out of the loop these days- mostly by design. When I was studying political science back in my university days, I had a great professor named Anthony Lake, who had been on Kissinger’s staff before resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, and who later resurfaced as Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor. Professor Lake liked to talk about the concept of “group think” (a phrase coined by his friend, Leslie Gelb, I believe), in which bureaucratic circles begin to all share the same assumptions and world view, and consequently all begin to distort reality in the same manner, leading to faulty analysis and projections. To my mind “group think” is the standard operating procedure in most areas of Californian wine country today (with a few notable exceptions), and most of the wines that I cross paths with share the same “cookie cutter” pattern: overripe fruit flavors, tarted up with the same commercial yeasts to produce the same spread of flavors, the same fashionable, obliterating French oak from the über-fashionable tonneliers and the same mind-numbing levels of high alcohol.

It seems like almost all of the wines are overseen by the same couple of consultants- Michel Rolland, Helen Turley or their posse, and I taste very few that seem worthy of standing in the shadows of the great wines fashioned in the 1970s and before. To my palate I can taste the McDonald’s mentality at work in most of these wines- engineering the flavors and aromatics to hit just the right sweet spot out of the blocks, and if it ends up being bad for the long-term health of the wine, who cares, because “we just need to move the new vintage through the pipeline”. To be fair, global warming has not done these folks any favors, but instead of addressing the very real problems presented by climate change, the powers that be have come up with this very convenient philosophy of “physiological ripeness” which allows them to let the grapes hang on the vine and bake away until the resulting wine will be a cross between grappa and boysenberry syrup. All you need to know about the winemaking philosophy out there at most places these days is with their having to water down most wines before letting the fermentations start (literally turn on the hoses and filling up the vats with water to try and cut down on the potential alcohol in the wines). Perhaps there is a problem with the methodology, no?

Rhône today
It’s funny that you ask me about the Rhône today, as I am in the midst of a large project on the region for my newsletter and have been awash in their wines for the better part of two months. If you would have asked me the same question two months ago, I think my response would have been different than it is today. To my thinking there seems to be more to hope for down the road here than was the case four or five years ago, as I seem to discern the first signs of some reigning in of the winemaking excesses that have plagued the region since at least the 1995 vintage. How to deal with global warming is still a big factor here, and until a new, universal approach is developed to the attendant issues of excessively high alcohol levels and stewed, overripe fruit tones, the region will continue to be a bit of a mine field for those with a palate looking for wines that do not stun or sear the tongue. But I see plenty of positive signs that at least some vignerons are starting to think seriously about the over the top style that has been championed for the last decade or more.

In the northern half of the region, the big problem to my mind has not been so much the climate change (though it of course has played a role here as well- just not as profoundly as in the south), but the stylistic chasing of Marcel Guigal. Guigal burst on the scenes in the late ‘70s with his very new oaky, much more heavily extracted styles of wines (particularly in Côte-Rôtie), and his attendant commercial success caught the attention of most of the other growers in the north. You have to remember that in the late 1970s when Marcel was really getting going, the Rhône was a vastly different animal than it is today, and the wines sold for next to nothing and wine was hardly a profitable business. All those steep, terraced vineyards had to be worked by hand, and with prices so depressed for the wines (most Côte-Rôtie was just drunk up by the “pichet” in the cafés in Ampuis those days for pennies a glass), it was awfully hard to make ends meet if you were the vigneron. There were abandoned vineyards everywhere, the younger generation was leaving en masse for better paying and less arduous jobs elsewhere, and it really looked like this area, where winemaking goes all the way back to Roman times, was on the verge of eventual distinction. As late as 1988, fully half of a great vineyard like La Landonne was fifty percent fallow!

Marcel Guigal came along and changed all that- almost single-handedly! There were of course other great producers in the north at this time: Marius Gentaz, Gérard Chave, Gérard Jaboulet, Noël Verset and Auguste Clape to name just a few, but it was Monsieur Guigal that caught the wine world’s imagination and pulled everyone else up with his boot straps. And we cannot forget the great service Robert Parker did at this time championing the best of these wines. The northern Rhône was saved, or at least its threat was transformed. At least people could make a good living making wine again, and a lot of the overgrown vineyards were reclaimed. The problem was that the Guigal wines, as good as they were at this time, were not particularly representative of the deep traditions in the region. People started to use a lot more new oak- emulating the Guigal wines perhaps- and not always with the most flattering results. Reclaimed vineyards also means young vines, and there is an awful lot of young vine wine made in the north these days, and with demand high, there is little incentive to reign in yields of these younger vines. So what one gets confronted with this young vine fruit that lacks concentration, and consequently has to be “monkeyed” with in the cellars to try and hide this fact. Or one harvests extremely late so that there can be a bit of residual sugar and higher alcohol to give the impression of depth, and of course new oak can also help with this. But with global warming, late harvesting means overripe flavors, zero acidity and really heady alcohol, all of which require more manipulating of the wines in the cellars, and often also translate into wines that do not age well in the bottle.

So there have been some pretty serious speed bumps in the north in the last fifteen years, and there were some very notable failures in the vintages of the mid to late 1990s. But it seems that things are swinging back towards the more traditional styles in the north, and of course the vines are getting older in the replanted sections, which means that a lot of producers are getting much higher quality fruit with which to work. The bigger firms still seem lost in the wilderness to my palate- Chapoutier, Guigal and the like, but many of the smaller growers are really starting to make exciting wines in the north. Amongst my favorites here is Éric Texier, who is doing simply brilliant work in the north. Cornas is another town that I see as at the beginning of a renaissance- it was kind of left behind when all the hoopla reached Hermitage and Côte-Rôtie in the late 1980s and 1990s- but there are some really good growers working here now, the most famous being Thierry Allemand. And I taste more and more serious examples from the “satellite” regions like Crozes-Hermitage and St. Joseph, not to mention the re-discovery of an appellation like Brézème- where Éric Texier is making brilliant wines- all these things point to good news in the not too distant future in the northern half of the Rhône. I don’t think that the “big boys” have figured it out yet- but they will in good time.

However, the southern half of the Rhône is another world, and global warming has really been throwing its weight around here. The incidence of ludicrously alcoholic wines is legion in Châteauneuf du Pape these days, and all of the other over the top winemaking excesses that have equally scarred other regions have wreaked havoc in the south. But one of the biggest plagues in the south these days is the huge expansion of syrah plantings in the vineyards here- not just in Châteauneuf du Pape, but also throughout the villages of the Côtes du Rhône. Syrah is just patently ill-suited to the warmer southern half of the Rhône at the best of times (and this is really exacerbated by climate change), as the grape’s sugars soar in the baking heat of the south before the skins, seeds and stems ripen fully, translating to wines that are both overly alcoholic and taste green from the unripe skins etc. And if the vigneron lets syrah hang long enough to ripen the skins, you get wines that are really horrible tasting, and with potential alcohol in the seventeen or eighteen percent range. Very macabre stuff. But what you do get with all this syrah being incorporated into the traditional blends in the south is dark color- black-purple wines. And here, Robert Parker has undone a lot of the good he previously did for the region by blindly praising these wines.

But there is good news in the south as well. There are several villages that are high up in altitude- for example, Cairanne and Vinsobres immediately come to mind, and here one can still make terrific wines. I just had a couple of Vinsobres bottlings from the owners of Château de Beaucastel, the Perrin family, that were flat out brilliant. There are also some real holdouts in the Châteauneuf region as well, led by Éric Texier, who makes simply stunning, old vine Châteauneuf du Pape from a blend of grenache and mourvèdre (no 17% syrah for his wines), and the wines of Château Mont-Redon are also just textbook, classic examples of the appellation that harken back to the pre-madness days of the 1980s and 1970s. You also have one of the biggest stars in Châteauneuf, Henri Bonneau, who absolutely hates syrah’s results in the south, and refuses to use any in his wines. There are probably many more that I simply have not tasted of late, because it is very hard to find more traditionally styled southern Rhône wines in the US market. Importers have told me off the record that such wines cannot generate high enough scores amongst the most influential American wine critics, so they will not sell well, and importers simply leave them behind rather than bring them into this country. I like to think of folks like Monsieur Texier and the Mont-Redon proprietors as the “French Resistance” in the area, and hope that they can gain more recruits as time goes by.

Champagne
Champagne is in the midst of a major sea change, and I think that in the long run it will be all to the good for this historic region. The explosion of small growers making and bottling their own Champagne is unprecedented in the long history of this region, and this has profoundly changed how the big houses now make their wines. Some of the big houses are fortunate enough to own a large chunk of their own vineyards, but other of the “Grandes Marques” have seen much of their former good sources for grapes and/or wine strike out on their own, and they have had to scramble for suppliers to meet their needs. A lot of times this strain has forced the big houses to cut corners a bit- maybe sell a non-vintage bottling a year earlier than they would have in the past, or include some production from lower tier vineyards that they would have deemed of insufficient quality to be included twenty-five years ago, or increasing a bit the dosage to make a slightly sweeter-styled non-vintage to try and cover up some of the side effects of points one and two- all these types of occurrences have been pretty readily visible if one has paid enough attention to the Champagne market in the last several years. Certainly the recent expansion of the area in the AOC for Champagne is one attempt to try and create a bit more production for the Grandes Marques to work with.

But to my mind, most of the Grandes Marques have done an admirable job in keeping up their quality in the face of these rather seismic changes in the region. Maybe the Veuve Clicquot non-vintage Brut is not as good as it was twenty years ago, but it is still a pretty impressive drink for something made in such a large quantity. And given just how potentially debilitating some of these supply issues could have been, they have really done a remarkable job with their top cuvées, which are every bit as profound as they have ever been. And while the big houses have been adjusting to the new realities in the market, the most exciting aspects of the changes in Champagne have been at the level of the small, grower-récoltant producers, who have struck out on their own and stopped selling off the bulk of their production to the Grandes Marques. There are now dozens and dozens of small producers making absolutely brilliant Champagne, and I have greatly expanded my own cellar of bubbly with the inclusion of my favorites from this genre of producers. I should be quick to point out that I am a pretty tough judge on a lot of these grower bubblies, as to my mind any wine from this region has a responsibility to remain true to the inherent and historical elegance of Champagne, and to my mind there are plenty of examples from small growers that do not meet this requirement.

However, the best small growers do indeed provide very elegant and sophisticated bubbly, and what is one of the finest attributes in this respect, is due to their smaller scale operations, often their wines will be a reflection of the one village in which they work and hold vines. This has awakened a possibility of comparing and contrasting the various terroirs of Champagne- say for instance the dramatic difference between the brilliant, pinot noir-dominated wines of someone like Bernard Brémont in Ambonnay and the very classic Blanc de Blancs of Vazart-Coquart in Chouilly. A generation ago, both growers’ wines might have been purchased by Taittinger and ended up blended together. In this respect things are very, very exciting right now in Champagne, though one has to be intrepid enough to buy the smaller growers’ wines, rather than just cop out and reach for the all too predictable bottle of Clicquot on your merchant’s shelves. And this extends to the wine merchants themselves- too many in the US and France treat Champagne simply as a commodity that needs to be stocked, and put together a selection of the familiar Grandes Marques and let the bottles sell themselves. This is one of the reasons so many merchants sell the vast majority of their Champagne around the holidays, because they put no effort into understanding the region and its changing ways. But I drink Champagne at least a couple of times a week- for an open bottle with a good stopper in the fridge maintains its freshness better than any other wine I can think of- and would never think of not having a bottle chilled at all times. So I need to be more fully able to dip my beak in the great mosaic that is Champagne today, and would never want to limit myself to just a few brand names.

Wine scores
There is too much scoring in baseball, and too little in soccer! As far as wine scores go, I am a man of my era, and my burgeoning interest in wine coincided with Robert Parker’s ascension in the world of wine criticism, so I have been living with wines being scored most of my wine-drinking life. Mr. Parker is actually the person who really got me interested in wine, as I can recall reading his journal in its earliest days (which coincided with my university stay) and dreaming about how great it must be to taste all these monumental, historical wines. So in this respect, I really do not have any problems with the scores. I certainly have at least as many issues with the prose of some wine writers these days as with their scores- style books anyone? But where I think scoring of wines has gone really off track is with the so-called “objectivity” school of wine criticism. Look, a critic’s job is to be subjective, not objective, and this is true in art criticism, food criticism or wine criticism. Tell me what you think about X, why, and if I find over time that our aesthetic perceptions coincide, then you are the critic for me. But too many wine writers these days try to hide behind the rubric of objectivity, claiming that even though the wine sucks, it is technically not a flawed wine, and therefore it should at least merit an 89 point score! To my mind that is just a cop out.

In the end all the objective approach does is squeeze everything into a very narrow range of numbers, where meaningful differentiation between the various wines becomes next to impossible, unless one reverts to the prose, which I think we already touched upon. When I read in the past about a wine with which I was unfamiliar, what I wanted to know most about was the style of the wine, as for me this is the most important determinant as a consumer if I am going to go out and buy a bottle from a producer that I have never tasted previously. I mean which would you rather drink- a passably good example of a wine that tastes like kissing Bridget Bardot in her golden youth, or a brilliantly-executed wine that has the palate impression of a Monster Truck collision in your mouth? Scores alone are not going to make this distinction for you- particularly from the camp of “objectivity”. But at least a subjective approach to scoring will fully prepare you for the mysteries on the other side of the cork- whichever you prefer is your business.

wine over 14% alc
If you had said fifteen percent, this would have been easy! In general I think it is important to realize that history has not been kind to wines put in the cellar with high levels of alcohol, other than fortified wines, but that is another story. For non-fortified wines, high alcohol usually translates into either a short cellar life or a less than positive evolution in the bottle- or both. There are of course exceptions- Henri Bonneau’s brilliant Châteauneuf du Papes immediately come to mind- but these are exceptions. For the vast, vast majority of wines, lower alcohol wines have traditionally aged longer and better. Part of this equation of course is that lower alcohol wines, having started with lower sugar levels in the grapes, generally start out life with higher acidity. I have been drinking wine a long time now, and it is pretty clear to me that acidity is the cornerstone to a wine’s ability to age gracefully for a long period in the bottle and remain fresh and vibrant. And wines that age well are the ones that interest me the most. The transformation that a wine undergoes with bottle age is still one of the mysteries of wine- how it improves, what chemical reactions are taking place- all of these things are still unknown even with our advanced levels of science. But if the key fundamentals are in place in the wine when young, we do know that the wine will change and evolve and become more beautiful with age. And one of these keys is sound acidity.

When one thinks back or reads about the legendary Bordeaux wines of the first half of the twentieth century- the 1945 Mouton-Rothschild, the 1928 Palmer, the 1929 Latour or the 1900 Margaux- one of the glaring things that so many commentators fail to mention is how low in alcohol these wines were back then- probably between eleven and twelve percent, and they came from ripe vintages in those days! One of the chief reasons that they lasted so long was specifically because they were lower in alcohol- balanced wines that were able to stand the test of time. As Monsieur Bonneau has emphatically proven, it is not impossible to balance your wines at high degrees of alcohol, but it is a hell of a lot harder to do it, and for every Monsieur Bonneau who has been able to succeed with his formula, there are thousands who have tried and failed miserably. A perfect example of the differences between higher and lower levels of alcohol are the 1947 and the 1949 Cheval Blanc- both great wines, but the headier, almost Port-like 1947 is nowhere near as interesting to my palate as the lower alcohol, hauntingly ethereal 1949. I have been fortunate to drink both wines on several occasions, and even once had them served side by side in the same flight at a memorable dinner, and I would be willing to argue that the beautiful 1949 will in the end prove to be the longer-lasting and ultimately more interesting wine. And let me be the first to tell you, not every high alcohol wine is a 1947 Cheval Blanc in the making- no matter what you read elsewhere!

I think that today high alcohol is one of the worst plagues in the world of wine, as it virtually guarantees that the wine in question will not stand the test of time in bottle. A lot of people might say “so what”, I want to drink my wines younger anyway, so what do I care about higher alcohol. Other than driving home from the dinner party, they may have a point. As long as there remains plenty of cellar-worthy, lower alcohol wines for those of us who want to age our wines, then it should not be a problem. In other words, if each individual wine exists in a vacuum, outside of the temporal world in which we live, then there is plenty of room for both kinds of wines. But the reality is that the new car in the driveway of the vigneron who let his grapes hang out on the vine until they were ready to fall off, and consequently was able to get a higher score (and more money) for his wine because some critic was suckered in by the black-purple color and the sweet, warming effects of alcohol on the palate which gave the wine a consistency of motor oil, then the odds are that a few vintages down the road, all of the nieghbors will be vacationing in September and picking their grapes in late October to try and make the same money and drive the same cars. That is just the way the world of wine works today, and consequently, the high alcohol wine that someone else likes will eventually threaten the extinction of my lower alcohol wines that I want to cellar for twenty years.

new, small oak barrels
Contrary to my reputation in some circles, I really do not mind wines with a lot of new oak. A perfect example are the Burgundies of producers such as Henri Jayer and Domaine Dujac. Both estates make (or made in Monsieur Jayer’s case) their wines almost entirely in new oak, and yet they are two of the finest producers of wine that I have ever had the pleasure to taste. But it is extremely hard to use a high percentage of new oak well, and it takes any extremely skilled artist in the cellar to be able to consistently pull this off. Unfortunately, there are not a whole lot of producers with as much skill as Monsieur Jayer had during his lifetime. Too often, new oak dominates the other characteristics of the wine, both on the nose and the palate, producing in a best-case scenario a one dimensional wine that derives many of its flavors and aromatics from the wood. And the worst-case scenario (all too familiar to those of us who taste a wide range of wines these days) is that the new oak has been imperfectly cured, and has leeched raw, resinous tones into the wine, which come across as sawdusty or resinous on the palate, and add so much raw wood tannin to the wine as to upset its balance. This condition is usually terminal- as the wine is too tannic from the wood to drink with much enjoyment when young, and spends its life stillborn and rigid from the oak, and eventually withers, with the fruit giving up the ghost while the wood tannins remain obstinately present. For those who are familiar with the New York subways, wines from the worst-case scenario camp are like two riders getting onto separate trains at Grand Central Station, with the fruit getting on the Express and the oak getting on the Local. After a short time, they are never going to come together again, and the fruit on the Express is going to be long gone by the time the oak arrives at the mutually agreed upon destination.

roto-fermenters
You mean paint shakers for Barolo? Roto-fermenters are just a flat out disaster. They manage to obliterate every ounce of terroir in the wine, and often can suppress the varietal characteristics as well. The dumbest thing about their use in Piemonte is that the biggest practitioners of their use will tell you that they need to use them to “tame the traditionally intransigent tannins of the nebbiolo grape”, and then of course, after beating the living daylights out of their nebbiolo with the roto-fermenters (to tame the tannins, remember), they will age their wines in new, French oak barrels, and infuse the wine all over again with new tannins, this time from the wood. So let me get this straight, the idea is to destroy the wine’s terroir and varietal character (a sad, but necessary side effect) to tame the tannins in the wine, and then we are going to leech in a ton of wood tannins (that will never integrate with what is left of the fruit in the abused wine) which in effect replace the tannins we removed at the price of the original character of the wine? Who writes this stuff?

Indigenous yeasts
The longer I drink, taste and write about wine, the more I am convinced that indigenous yeasts are a key fundament of great wine. It is not that it is impossible to make great wine with commercial yeasts, but these have to be strains that are engineered to be as unobtrusive and “transparent” as possible, so that the natural beauty of the wine that originates in the vineyard can be reproduced as faithfully as possible. But even the cleanest and clearest commercial yeast is not, in my opinion, going to quite match the complexity that comes with using indigenous yeasts. And most commercial yeasts these days are not engineered (or selected if you prefer the term) for their transparency, but rather to deliver specific flavor or aromatic spectrums in the wine, or more and more often, to be able to survive at higher levels of alcohol before dying off and ending the fermentation. It used to be that no yeasts could survive in solutions with alcohol above fifteen or so percent, but when you are trying to make a black-purple wine so that you can buy a new, black-purple Mercedes SUV, you need a “Rambo” yeast to do the job- one that can keep the fermentation going to sixteen and a half or seventeen percent. Otherwise, the winemaker is going to end up with more residual sugar than he or she desired (one of the dirty little secrets of the high octane school is that they are always looking for some residual sugar in their ostensibly “dry” wines), which may or may not effect which model of Mercedes they can buy when the new scores come out.

To give you a flavor of his preferences and picks, I asked him several questions via email. I broke it up in to two postings. In this first posting, John discusses what would be in his cellar if he were starting collecting today, what he drinks at home on a Tuesday night, the most underrated wines for aging, where Lafite 2005 will be in five years, and what would be his “desert island wine.” Onward!

If you had no collection and were going to put $1,000 into, say, at least two cases of wines available now for drinking 10+ years from now, what wines would you include?
I would start with buying red wines, as I think one can always find something very, very interesting to drink with younger white wines, but younger red wines just cannot compare with reds with bottle age. Clearly one of the places to start would be with 2005 or 2006 Loire reds- they will age along the lines of a top-flight Bordeaux and offer tremendous value. The 2005s are a bit more massive in scale, but both vintages are stellar, and at this point I am not sure I have a preference for one over the other. The top of my list from this region would include Pierre Breton’s Bourgueil “Clos Sénéchal” (find this wine), Bernard Baudry’s Chinon “Clos Guillot” (find this wine), Charles Joguet’s “Clos de la Dioterie”(find this wine), Philippe Alliet’s Chinon “Vieilles Vignes” (find this wine)and the regular bottling from Clos Rougeard (find this wine). With all of these, other than the Clos Rougeard, we are talking in the $300 to $400 per case range here. I would also have to have some Burgundy, and the 2005 vintage in the Côte de Beaune is where the good values are to be found in plentiful quantities. These would include anything from Chandon de Briailles, Patrick Bize, Jean-Mark Pavelot and Camus-Bruchon in Savigny-les-Beaune, the “happy hunting ground” for red Burgundy bargain shoppers. A case of Joseph Drouhin’s Beaune “Clos des Mouches” (find this wine)or Beaune “Grêves” (find this wine) from ’05 would also be great to have. I might also be tempted to buy a case of the 2001 Mayacamas cabernet sauvignon (about $50; find this wine), which is one of the few wineries still making wines exactly as they were made in the 1970s.

What are the most underrated wines for aging?
As far as red wines go, Cru Beaujolais and Loire Valley reds are neck and neck for this honor. A great Morgon from the Desvignes family or a Moulin-à-Vent from Domaine Diochon or Château Thivin’s Côte de Brouilly are brilliant wines with fifteen or twenty years bottle age on them. But it is hard not to get even more enthused with an old Bernard Baudry or Charles Joguet Chinon, or a Saumur from the Foucault brothers at Clos Rougeard. As far as white wines go, probably Vouvray or Montlouis, with an honorable mention for German rieslings.

On any given Tuesday evening, which wine’s likely to be on your dinner table?
If its not a tasting night with samples, usually red Burgundy. These days I am drinking a lot of 1998 and 2000 village wines, from people like Christophe Roumier, Domaine Mugneret-Gibourg, Domaine Dujac or Jean-Marie Fourrier in the north, or Savigny-les-Beaune gems from Camus-Bruchon, Jean-Marc Pavelot, Simon-Bize or Chandon de Briailles. If I need a white, Trimbach Cuvée Frédéric Émile Riesling or a wine from François Chidaine in Montlouis is a good bet during the winter, and German wines from Hanno Zilliken, Helmut Dönnhoff or Willi Schaefer in the warmer weather. I used to drink a lot of white Burgundy, but with the premature oxidation problems of the mid-‘90s, I don’t have too much anymore to drink from Chablis or the Côte de Beaune.

Will a case of Lafite 2005 be higher or lower in 12 months? And five years?
Lower in twelve months, and lower again in five years. China has been almost single-handedly driving the Lafite market, and they are going to become more sophisticated with their wine tastes as they become more familiar with the beverage, and diversification there will help ease the price of the ’05 Lafite over the coming years.

Best red Burgundy under $30?
Domaine Lafouge Auxey-Duresses rouge- either of their two premier crus are stellar- La Chapelle or Climat du Valle (find these wines). Domaine Coche-Dury’s Auxey-Duresses should be another candidate, but I don’t think it can still be found under thirty dollars these days.

What’s a top wine experience you had in 2008 where the context mattered as much as the wine?
A pair of retirement dinners with Jacky Truchot- one in Burgundy and one in the Washington D.C. area. Monsieur Truchot and his wines meant a lot to me personally, as his were the first great Burgundies I ever tasted, and on my first visit to the region, he and his wife Liliane actually put me up with their American importer. Jacky was the great unsung maestro of Morey St. Denis, and a man that did not really gain recognition for the brilliance of his wines until very late in his career, and yet never shied away from doing the right thing and making the very best wines possible. By the way, we did drink very well at both of his dinners.

You’re on a desert island and you could drink one last wine again, what would it be?
Good question. Probably the 1945 Comte de Vogüé Musigny “Cuvée Vieilles Vignes”, provided you could guarantee provenance to a condemned man stranded in the wilderness. The good bottles I have had of this wine are forever etched in my memory for their magical complexity, haunting perfume and ethereal palate impression. The first bottle I ever decanted of this wine simply filled up the room with its bouquet the minute it hit the glass- candied cherries, wild strawberries, orange zest, kaleidoscopic, autumnal Burgundian soil tones, coffee, woodsmoke and liquid roses. On the palate the wine was perfect- silky, dancing and still quite full, with an intensity of flavor that is unforgettable. Unfortunately, I have had a few bottles that were a bit bound up and malty as well, so you have to promise perfect storage!

Prices of all kinds of assets have declined precipitously since last December. Wine appeared somewhat immune as recently as September but evidence is now emerging that prices for collectible wines are entering a correction after many years of strong growth. The Liv-ex 100 Fine Wine Index fell 12.4 percent in October.

A close observer of auctions told me yesterday that two recent sales only sold 35 and 43 percent of lots. And some lots are going for well below the low price estimate. At another auction, someone else told me that a case of 1998 Grand Cru Chablis sold for $60. Even though there’s a risk of premature oxidation with that wine, $5 a bottle certainly seems like it’s worth a flier. Such a low selling price indicates that there was no reserve.

While many shops may have locked in higher costs, making them unwilling or unable to discount, some specialty shops do broker private collections too and can have faster turnarounds than auction houses. Provenance is always an issue with mature wine, so feel free to ask where the wines came from.

But some sellers at auction may be eager to liquidate making the secondary market may be the best place for wine deals this fall. Of course, if the global economic malaise continues into next year or beyond, declines in fine wine prices could continue. So you may not want to step in and catch too many falling magnums.

Some upcoming auctions: Zachys, Nov 6-8; Acker, Merrall Nov 7; Christie’s Nov 17 and 21; Sotheby’s Nov 22; Hart Davis Hart Dec 5.

Christie’s Wine Department had $71 million in sales worldwide last year, the bulk coming in Europe. On November 29, they will resume live auctions in Hong Kong. For the complete calendar, see the Christie’s Wine Department web site.

1. How is the financial turmoil affecting the fine wine market?
Like all industry leaders, Christie’s is watchful of the unfolding situation in the financial markets, particularly as it relates to our clients and business.

As regards the current financial malaise, it is important to note that the wine market has traditionally had little direct correlation to the financial markets, so we are cautiously optimistic that our business will continue to be strong throughout the fall season and beyond based on the quality of property we have scheduled for sale.

Recent sales results, healthy consignment levels for forthcoming sales, as well as the depth and breadth of our global client base, continue to support the long-standing axiom that passionate collectors seek rare and important objects based on their availability, not on external economic factors.

Our recent sale of 2000 Bordeaux in London is a prime examples of the strength of the current wine market in spite of the above mentioned trading conditions. The sale was 98% sold by value, with particularly robust results for Lafite and Latour as well as the signature 59 case superlot that closed the sale. Results from our competitors are also consistent with this view.

If difficulties on Wall Street occasionally serve to bring long-horded collections to market, there are always buyers for those collections. I have recently spoken with several individuals seeking to expand their position in fine wine on the assumption that this fall’s offer will be exceptionally rich.

2. Which categories or properties are particularly in favor right now?
The current market is somewhat polarized at present, with collectors favoring the top wine in mint condition. This includes Bordeaux’s “super eight”: the five first growths + Petrus, Ausone and Cheval; DRC and other top Burgundies such as Rousseau, Roumier, and Ponsot; and a limited number of iconic wines from producers in other regions, such as Screaming Eagle and Grange Hermitage. For this client, condition is of the utmost importance, and top dollar goes to full cases of wine in their original wood case.

The trade, on the other hand, has been focusing on “value” lots, such as the “super second” chateaux in Bordeaux, 1er cru Burgundy from early-maturing vintages such as ’01, ’00, ’98; Champagne, and new world wines from up-and-coming producers such as Sloan in California, Quilceda Creek in Washington, and Chris Ringland in Australia. Here condition and provenance are still very important, but buyers will more easily tolerate cases that are not complete.

3. Can you go short Lafite?
To the best of my knowledge, no one has profited from shorting a wine, and such an effort would certainly be risky. Theoretically, though, if one expected the market to decline, one could offer the wine for sale at a given price on a set date and hope to purchase it prior to that date at a lower price from a motivated seller. So while theoretically it might be possible to short Lafite, this is certainly not a gamble that I would feel comfortable taking in the present climate. Lafite is just the sort of blue-chip property that has held its value very well in the present climate, since investors see it as a hedge against volatility.

4. How are wine investment funds changing the fine wine landscape?
Wine investment funds have more of an impact in the U.K. than they do here in the U.S., but their influence is beginning to be felt. Since the managers of these funds tend to have fixed, somewhat conservative portfolios of wine that they try to acquire it has meant that there are in some cases more dollars chasing a diminishing amount of wine, ultimately fueling recent increase in prices. It is impossible, however, to separate this from the another type of new demand coming on line – the new wealth from rapidly growing economies such as those in Russia, China, India, Brazil and other countries.

5. What are some categories right now that represent accessible entry points for people just getting in to collecting or consuming mature wine?
The best way to participate in a wine auction is as follows:

A. Decide the type of wine that you will pursue and the amount of money that you’d like to invest. Remember that top wines from top vintages command a healthy premium, but have the best resale value.

Value categories include second growth Bordeaux, particularly from the less sought after years. 1996 red Bordeaux is a great one to target, since there’s plenty of stock, and while prices have risen, they’re far from the top end. The 1995 vintage is also very attractively priced, and the wines should mature more quickly.

The top wines from California still attain very generous prices, but there are a host of classic properties behind the five or so top cult wines that are extraordinary values.

There are also great bargains to be had, as there have been for the past several years, in white Burgundy and in Italian wines. Look for ’96 white Burgs (which are holding up better than previously thought) and for Barolos from the ‘80s.

B. Identify relevant lots in upcoming sales
C. Understand the market for the wines that you covet – how much are they “worth”? How rare are they? What should they sell for? What constitutes a bargain in this category?
D. Formulate a bidding guideline for yourself – where will you start? Where will you drop out
E. By all means, attend the sale to watch the ebb and flow, meet the participants, and drink a glass of champagne. Be certain to meet the specialists, who will be very happy to offer you their take on the sale at hand and the market in general.

Roger Johnston and Jon Warner in Argonne ’s Vulnerability Assessment Team have developed a cap that can be put in place at the winery to track if the bottle has ever been opened or tampered with.

However, if you thought resistance to screwcaps was high in the realm of fine wine, get a load of this Lojac meets Denver Boot meets car alarm thingy. And just look how it makes your laptop bug out when you connect the two! Full details on the story in their press release. (hat tip: Andrew)

In other wine and technology news circulating today, the e-tongue has resurfaced. But we’ve already wagged our tongues at that one!

Related: The Billionaire’s Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace

Such is a great scene near the beginning of the fantastic book Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine. Released last month, this page-turning book that reads like fiction has already reached the extended NYT bestseller’s list. It’s a wine book that has a lot of appeal beyond simply wine geeks since the book’s verve derives not from tasting notes but a mystery over whether the bottle that Shanken and Forbes bid on was real or fake.

Of course, for wine geeks, there’s not a lot of suspense in the final outcome since in the past couple of years, there have been so many developments in the story of the “Jefferson bottles,” amply detailed in the New Yorker and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal among other places. Billionaire Bill Koch has sued many players by now but most importantly Hardy Rodenstock, the German collector and seller of the Jefferson bottles and the litigation remains unresolved. But even if the plot line and characters are well known to wine geeks, and the main drama has not yet reached its bitter conclusion in the courts, the book is so well written that it is an absolute pleasure to read.

With all the billionaires, their bling bottles and, eventually, lawsuits, there’s plenty of action to sit back and pass the popcorn. Unfortunately, the excess and hedonism where tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are literally pissed away left me occasionally wanting to say “pass the dump bucket” out of revulsion at the ostentation.

But that very Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous quality paired with the wine intrigue means that the movie rights have already been sold, as we discussed in February complete with speculation about which actors could play the roles. It’s a movie that I look forward to seeing. Though after reading the book, I’m reminded that there is something missing: women. This profound look into the world of wine collecting reveals just how few women there are, something that will doubtless be corrected for the silver screen. Let’s just hope the story isn’t diluted into a counterfeit in the process.

Even if you aren’t that into wine as an investment, the section offers a lot of bang for the free buck. The lead article by Jancis Robinson is about Hong Kong as an emerging center for wine (as we discussed here with a focus on riesling) and I’d like to return later to some of the other issues raised in other pieces. For now, I thought the round-table with three American collectors, including the “Big Boy,” Rob Rosania (his Salon 1996 strategy we also already discussed), provided a quick observation worth noting.

Older vintages are woefully undervalued is one sentiment that the collectors bring up. I have felt the same way since I bought a beautifully mature 1971 Giacomo Conterno Barolo last year for $300, which is a mere fraction of other collectible wines upon release today.

Raymund Tuppatcsh, one of the collectors in the roundtable, says that’s going to change soon. “I think you are going to see a correction to the upside like you’ve never seen – a tripling or quadrupling of prices over the next 18-24 months.” Yikes. Time to buy more wines from our birth years now?

(image)

This factoid from a recent Bloomberg article piqued my interest: Rosania owns 400 cases of the excellent champagne Salon 1996 (minus the five he sold at auction) out of a total of 5,000 produced. Poking around on the web revealed other sources saying that there were 8,000 cases produced. And these are six-bottle cases that we’re talking about. The champagne retails for $250 – $300 (search for the Salon 1996).

It’s a fascinating strategy for investing in wine. Rosania has somewhere between five and eight percent of this blue chip wine outstanding–and that percentage rises every time a cork of it is popped elsewhere. That’s probably a good percentage of the production to have to really benefit from a future price move yet not control the market entirely. It would be hard to take an equivalent percentage of a first growth Bordeaux wine since the production volumes are higher. All it takes is a big cellar and a cool $700k or so.

Even if the economy stagnates, wine such as this will probably always have buyers. Could it double in value in ten years? Even if it doesn’t Rosania can always have fun popping open the bottles of this fine wine with his saber.

I’ve tried a tasting-sized-pour of the 96 Salon and it is a brilliant champagne. In a wine investing video game, I might be tempted to adopt a similar strategy. If, in some fantasy world, you were going to take ten percent of a wine, which would it be?

Apparently Asian buyers are getting much more wine savvy. It wasn’t long ago that they only bought wines with 100 point Parker scores, perhaps a sign of slavish following more than connoisseurship.

But now I am wondering if the locals are waking up to the joys of pairing Riesling with the cuisine. And the quality of German Riesling just keeps getting better and better. Perhaps they now have confidence to venture away from Bordeaux and cult Cali cabs.

Actually, since I am really getting into the sublime pleasure of German Riesling, dry and off-dry, young and mature, the thought of demand from Asia is something of a doomsday scenario for me. The last thing I need is to have investors pile in and run up the price in yet another category of wine!

Now, the WSJ goes back to the well and reported on p. A16 on yesterday that Bill Koch has sued Zachys and collector Eric Greenberg in federal court in New York. Koch bought $3.7 million from a Zachys auction on October 28, 2005 that was sourced to Greenberg’s cellar and now alleges that 11 of those bottles were fakes. Zachys declined to comment and Greenberg’s attorney called the allegations “absolutely false.”

But now Howard “wine under $20″ Goldberg rides in with the revelation on Decanter.com that it was Eric Greenberg’s cellar that was auctioned this past weekend by Acker, Merrall. Acker had previously not named the collector who was selling, instead referring to it as “the man with the golden cellar.” It fetched $15.6 million including commissions.

Related: “Has the wine auction market peaked?” [Dr. V]
See the official court papers via scribd.com

Montes is one of the more recent quality producers, more Lexus than Toyota (although they do have reliable wines at $10). Started in 1987 as a partnership between Aurelio Montes and Douglas Murray, the company now makes wines in Argentina under the Kaiken brand and in Napa, from Rutherford and Coombsville, to be released in 2008.

At a recent tasting in New York City with Aurelio Montes, a key question for me was: can Chilean wines age? With eight vintages of the Alpha M (a cabernet-dominant blend, generally about $80 retail) in front of me dating back to 1997, I tasted through to find the answer to be yes but the record is short and mixed. I also found out about the mysterious phenomenon of the “annual rhythm.”

First to the tasting. My favorite Alpha M was the 2003. This big, lush wine was well integrated with smooth tannins and notes of blackberries, cassis, and saddle leather. Aurelio suggested it had the stuffing to last another ten years. I could see that.

The 2005 was my next favorite, a big, frisky Labrador of a wine with toasty oak notes. It had higher alcohol than the 03 with 14.5% vs 14%. Approachable now in its youth, I would like to see a few years of bottle age on it to see it mellow a bit. You know, a Labrador at the end of a day, sitting by the fire.

My next two faves were the 2001 and the 1997. These wines exhibited more maturity and the 2001 was still big and fresh but showed more refinement than the younger vintages. The 1997 had the brick red coloring of older cabernet and did have more mature fruits rather than fresh with a faint mustiness, sort of “grandma’s attic.” But it was rewarding and worthwhile, like an (even) older wine from the Medoc. The 1999 was also solid, drinking well now. Of note, the alcohol level rose from 13.5 in 1997 to 14.9% in 2004, mirroring a trend seen around the wine world.

The Da Vinci Code numerologists among you will have noticed that all of these vintages are from odd-numbered years. In the “annual rhythm,” Aurelio explained to me over lunch that there is indeed vintage variation in Chile despite it being “paradise” for vines, a land spared the vineyard afflictions of phylloxera, mildew, Pierce’s Disease, and summer rain. While some years may be knocked out completely by El Nino, a pattern has emerged where the even-numbered years are lower quality. Aurelio suggested that in a sort of rhythm, the vine pushes one year, and then has quiet year the next.

In this tasting, my bottle of 1998 was oxidized, the 2000 was the best of the even years, the 2002 was nonexistent and the 2004 had grippy, peppery tannins but this Alpha M was still “the best of the worst” year according to Aurelio.

If Montes is a Lexus, then the winery’s barrel room is the garage. Maybe the Gregorian chants that Aurelio plays at his Feng Shui winery will help soothe those wines from even-numbered years as they slumber.

(Image: Montes)