With the arrest of Rudy Kurniawan (on March 8, 2012), an extraordinary chapter in the history of wine fraud has begun to close. Two recent articles, Mike Steinberger’s A Vintage Crime in Vanity Fair, and Ben Wallace’s Château Sucker in New York, have ably chronicled the facts as we now know them, though I strongly suspect that further revelations may emerge.
Of course fraudulent wine is neither a contemporary phenomenon nor one that will disappear with Rudy’s arrest. But what has happened in the decade in which Rudy Kurniawan flourished and then fell represents a loss of innocence, especially for Burgundy lovers, as what was once an insular province of connoisseurs, sharing dusty bottles while speaking a language few outsiders understood, became part of the larger marketplace for luxury goods, now eagerly sought as a badge of success by a rising class of wealthy consumers around the globe. Well within the term of memory, great wines, especially older Burgundies, were relatively affordable, and still treated with the deference due subtle and ineffable pleasures, rather than brandished as expensive trophies in contests of conspicuous consumption. Those of us who experienced it can mourn the passing of that era but we cannot bring it back.
Because my perspective is that of someone passionate about old Burgundy, and because I ultimately came to play a small role in Rudy’s downfall, I thought that it might be useful to tell the story of Rudy Kurniawan’s rise and fall as I saw it. I do not pretend to bring the kind of reportorial skills or narrative scope to this story that either Steinberger or Wallace did. What I hope to be able to do is to set down, as faithfully as I can recall, my observations and impressions during the time when Rudy was a major figure in the world of rare wine, well before the denouement of this extraordinary tale was known.
There are more than a few parallels between Rudy’s career and that of Hardy Rodenstock a generation earlier. Rodenstock’s fraudulent career, though, however splashy the “Jefferson” bottles of supposed 18th Century Bordeaux made it, was more limited in scope than Rudy’s became. Interest in wine among a new and wealthy audience, where labels were far more important than the liquid inside, had certainly been growing for many years. But Rudy’s arrival seemed to coincide with a new bacchanalian era, in which investment bankers and real estate moguls dueled not with pistols but with magnums of ’47 Château Lafleur and jeroboams of ’62 La Tâche. And Rudy was able to take advantage of a certain credulousness that went with this growing hunger for the old and rare–the fervent desire of these collectors to believe that their wealth and aggressiveness had given them unique access to trophies others could not have, compounded with a lack of knowledge both of how improbable it was that these rarities still existed in such large quantities, and of what these great wines were supposed to taste like. And where Rodenstock had largely confined himself to top Bordeaux, Rudy’s fraud, beginning there, soon began creeping into hitherto relatively untouched corners of the wine world, particularly Burgundy.
Even now, there is still little understanding of how this baby-faced young man rose, seemingly from nowhere, to the point where he could fool many of the world’s wealthiest collectors. Those who became a part of his world were, for the most part, badly burned and are understandably not eager to talk, while a fair amount of the internet commentary, indulging itself in an orgy of schadenfreude, has assumed every bottle he served or sold must have been fake and that everyone who ever drank wines with, or bought wines from, Rudy had to have been either a dupe or an enabler. As so often happens with tales that capture the broader imagination, events and characters get reduced to black and white, and all nuance is lost. The story of how he was able to fool so many bright, successful people for so long is however more complex—and ultimately more interesting.
I first became aware of Rudy by reputation; as best I can recall, this was probably sometime in early or mid 2004. His reputation as it came to me was that of a rich, young (at that time about 28) Indonesian who had rapidly become a fixture on the auction scene as one of the biggest buyers of great Bordeaux and Burgundy, and who was also aggressively buying these wines through European and other brokers. Some of my earliest impressions of Rudy came through the highly entertaining tasting notes/travelogue that John Kapon was then publishing in hard copy—tales of nights spent drinking massive quantities of rare old wines until they—or at least John—passed out. I would also see Rudy at the occasional auction I attended, always bidding heavily. Though I did not realize it until many years later, Rudy by early 2005 (and perhaps before) had also started to sell fraudulent wines at auction, though for a long time he claimed he was only a buyer and never sold, one of many untruths he told to maintain the illusion—including his name, his family connections, the extent of his wealth. (The story, as it was then being circulated, was that he was the youngest son in an incredibly wealthy Indonesian family, whose older brothers had sent him to the US with an allowance of $1 million a month to stay out of the family businesses they were running.) While it is now known that Rudy Kurniawan is not his real name, and that he had been living here illegally for years, his family and background remain a mystery—as, more significantly, does the real source of the considerable amounts he was spending on wine and the good life.
How did he succeed, despite his sudden appearance from nowhere, in fooling so many people? The cornerstone of the scheme, I believe, was that he liberally and even lavishly served real, great wines both to his intended “marks” and also to critics and to acknowledged connoisseurs, then sold the marks fake versions of the wines that they had drunk with such pleasure and that both the critics and knowledgeable friends were extolling. Again, for those who would believe every bottle he ever served was fake, let me repeat that this was not the case, and that if it had been, I seriously doubt the scheme would have succeeded. First, a great deal of Rudy’s entertaining, in New York at least, consisted of ordering $50,000 or more worth of wine off the lists at Cru or Veritas. These were not wines from his cellar; rather, the point was to reinforce the story that he was a generous trust-fund baby without a care in the world, just a party dude who loved to drink great wine. (My own exposure to this was limited to two or three of these events—I was certainly curious, and if the orgiastic, “because we can” nature of these events was repulsive, the chance to drink super-rare bottles provided an offsetting attraction. Ultimately, though, I began to feel uncomfortable being a recipient of this largesse from someone whose motives I could not discern—though it was only later that I began to have real doubts about what he was up to.) As only emerged much later, these sprees were in fact relatively cost-free, as Rudy would have the empty bottles returned to him and refill them, and I suspect that by the time he came to resell them, they may well have been worth even more than what he had paid for them, due to the rising market he was creating.
That rising market is the second nuance of this scheme. As far as I can tell, Rudy started out buying and then counterfeiting mostly Bordeaux and, among Burgundies, DRC. But he soon must have realized that there were easier wines to counterfeit, and turned his attention to other Burgundy producers, particularly Roumier and Rousseau. First, the variations in labeling, bottling, branding of corks and other practices of most Burgundy producers made it harder to create a uniform standard against which counterfeit bottles could be measured. Second, Rudy had a perfect foil in a major collector (and a good friend of mine), who bought these producers’ wines voraciously and almost regardless of price, so that Rudy could when he wished drive up the market for these wines simply by bidding aggressively, knowing that my friend would ultimately outbid him—and knowing also that he would help sustain demand for the additional bottles of these wines that Rudy would soon provide to the market. Small wonder, then, that this eventually led Rudy to begin reproducing wines from Ponsot, the same collector’s other favorite producer, though in the end it proved his undoing.
If the heart of the scheme was to open real bottles, and then sell fake versions of them, clearly Rudy had to serve wines not just from restaurant lists but more importantly from his own collection, both for his “marks” and others who might help spread the word. As one of the largest purchasers of rare wines in the worldwide market, Rudy had no shortage of genuine bottles to serve (and again, he could recoup his costs by refilling them with something else and reselling them). Rudy also possessed an excellent palate–though I suspect he may have used a few parlor tricks to identify wines in blind tastings. My impression was that he was very good at analyzing and remembering tastes, certainly far superior to some of the wealthy label drinkers with whom he often consorted. But the group around Rudy also included some quite discerning collectors, with palates and a depth of knowledge superior to his. Nonetheless, impressed by what they tasted, they provided credibility for him with less-knowledgeable collectors. Indeed, some of them fell for the con as well, presuming that when their new friend sold them bottles privately, they were from the same source as what they had tasted, and that they were getting in on the “inside.”
It is hard to pinpoint, after so many years, just when my doubts began. At Acker’s Top 100 tasting in October 2004, there was considerable talk about how a number of the Bordeaux were clear or probable fakes (in the former category, a magnum of ’59 Ch. Haut Brion that tasted like a cheap Rhone; in the latter, a magnum of ’47 Lafleur), though the Burgundies generally fared better. Rudy was at this tasting, and I recall his crowing about how well the bottles he had supplied had shown—though whether that was true or not, I could not say, as he didn’t identify which were his. However, by the next year, at Acker’s follow-up event, the Top 100 All-Stars tasting in October 2005, I began to have real questions, as did my friend Allen Meadows, about a number of the Burgundies, including bottles of Romanée-Conti, that Rudy had supplied. But as these were wines few of us had ever tasted before, and they were plausible even if counterfeit, I did not detect much doubt among my fellow tasters, and even among those of us who did have doubts, we still were inclined toward the possibility that the provider of those wines had himself been duped.
When “The Cellar” sale at Acker took place in January 2006, it seemed natural to me (though apparently not to others) to wonder whether this amazing flood of Roumier, Rousseau, etc. could in fact be real. Here were wines produced in miniscule quantities, of which I had seldom seen more than single bottles despite many years of searching, now available in case+ quantities. Thus, the six-month unconditional guarantee that Rudy offered seemed to provide a good opportunity to test my and others’ doubts. As my good friend Don Stott had bought a substantial number of the Roumiers and Rousseaus, he and a group of us hatched the idea of putting the Roumier bottles to the test–and of inviting Christophe Roumier to join us.
Before that tasting could take place, the October 2006 Cellar II sale occurred, and that sale raised further doubts about how so many of these ultra-rare bottles could suddenly have surfaced. In the run-up to Cellar II, I had the opportunity, along with Allen Meadows, to taste some of the Burgundies being offered in that sale. The formal pre-sale tasting was held downstairs in the private room at Cru. Allen had been invited, but was leaving on a late flight to France, and in any event was really only interested in the Burgundies (there was plenty of Bordeaux being served as well), so he suggested that he and I have a bite to eat in the bar at Cru and arrange to get a taste of the Burgundies being served that night. It was an interesting experience, instructive then and even more so in retrospect. To reiterate what I have said before, Rudy owned, and served when it suited his purposes, many great bottles, and certainly the ’62 Rousseau Chambertin Clos de Bèze we tasted that night (Rousseau’s first Bèze) was both authentic and spectacular. Rudy’s purpose, as I later learned, was to validate the numerous bottles, of what was supposedly the same wine, that would appear in the sale the next day. Indeed, at the time, John Kapon was giving voice to the proposition that the only way to tell for sure whether or not a bottle was real, was to open and taste it. If you believe that an experienced taster can develop sufficient proficiency to distinguish real from fake among wines he or she is familiar with—something I definitely do believe—then John’s proposition seems true enough, as far as it goes. The problem, though, is that tasting one real bottle doesn’t assure that the rest of the bottles, despite identical labels/corks/capsules, are also authentic. And as we were to learn from the Roumier tasting, Rudy had developed an interesting twist on this as well.
However, if there certainly were several real bottles that we tasted that night, there were also several that seemed highly questionable. Among the latter was a ’59 Ponsot Clos de la Roche Vieilles Vignes, which had a remarkable level of acidity for a ’59—a polite way of saying it was very unlikely to have been from that vintage. Similarly, a ’59 Roumier Musigny, a super-rare bottle of which there were perhaps a little over 200 produced under the Roumier label (yet there were 12 on sale in the Cellar II auction in addition to the 6 that had already been sold in the Cellar I auction), seemed quite dubious, as did several of the other wines. Nonetheless, as I later learned, the group gathered downstairs, primed with plenty of Champagne, drinking not spitting, and in the presence of their ever-generous host, did not find reasons to be skeptical.
At that point, though I had developed serious concerns about the number of questionable wines coming via Rudy, I still was not fully ready to believe that he was participating in a fraudulent scheme. In this, I was still influenced, no doubt, by Rudy’s disorganized, slacker dude demeanor, reinforced by the story I had heard from John Kapon about how he and a team had had to go out to LA to pick out and pack up the wines from Rudy’s cellar at the last minute, because Rudy could never get around to it himself. It also still did not seem implausible that, with his voracious buying, Rudy—despite his self-proclaimed ability to spot fakes—had picked up a significant number of them that had gone into his cellar sight unseen. And for every questionable bottle I’d had from him, there were several—like that ’62 Rousseau Bèze —that were unforgettably great.
Three months later, in January 2007, the long-planned Roumier tasting finally took place, and the delay allowed us to include some additional bottles that Don Stott had purchased in the Cellar II auction. Christophe Roumier participated in the tasting, as did Allen Meadows, Tim Kopec and other tasters with long experience of Roumier wines. In all, we tasted 15 bottles of Roumier (6 Musigny, 8 Bonnes Mares and 1 Amoureuses), of which 11 had been purchased from the two “Cellar” auctions and 4 from other sources. Other than with respect to one bottle, there was no difference whatsoever in the conclusions of the tasters. Of the bottles sourced from the two “Cellar” auctions, 3 were clearly authentic—and superb–6 were clearly fraudulent, one was corked, and one was probably but not clearly fraudulent. Among the wines deemed fraudulent was a bottle of the ’59 Musigny, which had aroused our skepticism the prior October, as well as the ’55 Musigny (two bottles were tasted), clearly a wine from grapes grown well south of Burgundy, and the ’45 and ’29 Bonnes Mares (the latter also not a Pinot Noir).
The high number of fraudulent wines was clearly disturbing, but what was in a way more disturbing was the apparent randomness of the bottles deemed authentic. The labels on the fraudulent bottles were surprisingly pristine for wines that were ostensibly 50-85 years old, and there were other label and capsule issues; however, the authentic bottles looked much the same (in other words, in this case it wasn’t that the fakes looked real; rather, the real bottles looked fake). Also, most of the bottles we drank, fraudulent and genuine, had been pulled at random from a larger quantity of the same wine that had been purchased. What to make of this? Our supposition was that in order to remove whatever doubt the new and questionable labels might have engendered, the authentic bottles Rudy had served at tastings were given the new labels as well. For example, a bottle of ’62 Roumier Musigny with a pristine-looking label would naturally raise some questions. But if you serve a real bottle onto which you’ve applied the same pristine label, then you can overcome many of the suspicions that such a label would otherwise raise. All that needs to be added is a story about why the labels are so new-looking (one version I heard was that the bottles had been stored in the Nicolas cellar outside Paris since release and that because the original labels had deteriorated, they had all been re-labeled prior to sale.) Yet there must have been some way for the forger to tell which bottles were authentic, and could be served, though we were in our examination unable to discern what that was. Also, assuming there was indeed some inconspicuous way of telling good from bad, then Rudy would have been able to reach into a case and, seemingly at random, pull out a bottle that could be opened and “prove” the authenticity of the remaining inauthentic bottles.
(One curious phenomenon I have not been able to sort out is the substantial difference in the quality of the fakes that Rudy produced during his career—as noted for example in the Roumier tasting, a number of bottles were not even Pinot Noir—yet in other cases Rudy clearly was also substituting lesser or younger vintages (perhaps with some clever mixing) for older and rarer, which is much less easy to detect unless one is fairly familiar with the vintage in question (and which may have been the case with some of the Romanée-Contis at the Top 100 All-Stars tasting), and eventually he started substituting relatively inexpensive negociant Burgundy of the same vintage and appellation for top-producer wines few had ever tasted before, which made the frauds even harder to detect.)
Nevertheless, the results of the Roumier tasting, reflecting that more than 60% of our sample of some of the most desirable wines in the “Cellar” auctions were fraudulent, made it abundantly clear that one could no longer credit the possibility that the number of fraudulent wines was incidental and to be expected given how much Rudy was buying and how little control he was exercising over his purchases. At this level of fakes, the only realistic explanation was that he was a witting medium for the distribution of a significant amount of fraudulent wines. At this point, though, the extent and purpose of the fraud were still unclear, as despite the significant number of fakes among the trophy wines, a number of the other wines tasted from the two Cellar sales, especially but not exclusively the non-trophy wines, had not been fraudulent. Among the questions we left the tasting with were where were the fakes coming from, who was manufacturing them, what proportion of his wines were fake and what genuine, and how—other than by opening and drinking them–could one reliably tell which was which?
And for me personally, the results of this tasting raised another serious issue. By early 2007 when the Roumier tasting took place, preparations were nearly complete for a major tasting of Romanée-Conti that I had, along with Michael Rockefeller and Allen Meadows, been planning for over two years. This tasting, which eventually became the most comprehensive tasting of Romanée-Conti ever held, with 74 vintages represented going back to 1870, had already been postponed more than once–first because we did not have all the wines we wanted and later in order to accommodate Aubert de Villaine’s schedule. As a major collector of Romanée-Conti, Rudy had been invited when the planning was initially underway back in 2005–well before the first Cellar sale took place–and as with everyone else coming to the tasting, he was expected to provide some of the wines. What if some of the wines he had already sent a year in advance, at my insistence, were fraudulent? The thought chilled me.
The first step was to examine all the bottles Rudy had provided. Fortunately, most were from the hardest-to-find vintages, which were not, as one might think, the great vintages, but rather the off vintages that few had kept, but that no one would bother to fake (and indeed, it appears that Rudy became an avid collector of those off-vintages of Romanée-Conti, presumably because something such as the ’63 or ’65 could be readily “upgraded,” with a little assistance, to a far more expensive vintage). Nonetheless, I took pains to examine the labels, capsules and corks carefully. Second, we had already made sure to have back-up bottles from separate sources of most vintages, so that in case a particular bottle was “off” for some reason, it could readily be replaced with a bottle from an entirely different source. Third, Rudy still had a track record of producing real bottles for important public occasions, and the presence at our tasting of Aubert de Villaine seemed likely to dissuade him from trying to slip through any fake bottles. But one issue could not be avoided: the 1945, the holy grail of Burgundy, of which only 608 bottles were ever produced. Years of searching had turned up only one bottle, belonging to Rudy. Nor did it help my frame of mind that I had already tasted two bottles of this wine provided by him (at the Top 100 All-Stars tasting described above), neither of which seemed real. Nonetheless, I was at least partly relieved to see that the label, capsule and bottle all appeared authentic and that the bottle for our tasting did not have the same questionable import strip labels that were on several of the bottles he had brought to that Acker tasting.
In the event, our tasting (which is described at length in Allen Meadows’s book, Pearl of the Côte,) was thankfully not marred by fraudulent bottles (as confirmed by Aubert de Villaine–and given the total immersion of tasting 74 vintages of Romanée-Conti over three days, each vintage in the context of comparable vintages of the era, even a well-crafted fake would have stood out in bold relief). When it came to the ’45, I quietly held my breath, but fortunately I had guessed right, and Rudy had sacrificed a real bottle for the occasion (we all signed the label afterwards, so it could not have been reused). It was, and remains, the best bottle of wine I have ever had, fully deserving of the accolades that Allen accords it in Pearl. Indeed Aubert, as always, had the last word, calling this ‘45 “the lost voice of Romanée-Conti” (it was the last vintage of this wine from pre-phylloxera rootstock, which imparts a special texture to the wine that is recognizably different from more modern examples). Having now had the real thing, it also made me more certain than ever that the two bottles Rudy had supplied to the Top 100 All-Stars had been concocted. (As was another bottle, tasted two years later, that had been purchased from Rudy; as with the Top 100 All-Stars bottles, it seemed a reasonably well-crafted fake, but a fake nonetheless.)
As a coda to the tasting, we asked the participants if they would like to take home any bottles as souvenirs of the occasion. While some people did take home bottles, much to my surprise Rudy (who, I had assumed, would have no interest in empty bottles) asked to take back all the bottles he had brought. Though he claimed he wanted them to decorate a store he was going to open (with Paul Wasserman), it seemed odd, but I figured that, slacker that he seemed to be, he would forget about it. Not so; after about a month, he got in touch to ask if I’d sent them. At that point, I sent back a few full bottles of his that we hadn’t used in the tasting, but not the empties. But he did not let go, continuing to pester me, and finally I concluded that, since they were his bottles, and since at that point I had nothing other than vague discomfort to go on, I did not have a reasonable basis for treating him differently from the other participants. Only much later was I to learn that this was a pattern of behavior with Cru and probably others, and that he was refilling and reselling the bottles that were returned.
Subsequent to that tasting, I recall little interaction with Rudy until the following year. The story of the April 2008 Acker auction has been told a number of times, including in the Steinberger and Wallace articles, but as I was fated to play a significant role in those events, it may be worth recounting them from my perspective. It began when I started thumbing through Acker’s catalog, which though it was advertised as Rob Rosania’s sale also contained several sections, separately identified though not with his name, that were clearly Rudy’s wines. Many of the fraudulent or questionable Roumier and Rousseau bottles from the same vintages and appellations as in prior sales were back for yet another outing (three more ’59 Roumier Musigny, for example). When I reached the Ponsot section, with its pictures of 50+-year old bottles of Clos de la Roche with pristine labels and “Vieilles Vignes” designations where they shouldn’t have been, it was even more disturbing. However, what particularly caught my attention was the older Ponsot Clos St. Denis. My first reaction was surprise, in that I had never seen any Ponsot Clos St. Denis of this age, or indeed any older than 1985. My next reaction was curiosity, as to when Ponsot started producing Clos St. Denis, and a quick check of the website revealed that their agreement to produce this wine, from land belonging to the Mercier family (Domaine des Chézeaux), only started in the early ‘80s. Was it possible, though, that the Ponsot family had had some agreement, years earlier and since terminated–whether with the Merciers or someone else–to buy or make this wine? I asked another knowledgeable friend, who had also never seen any pre-1985 bottles before, and then got in touch with Allen Meadows. Coincidentally, he told me he had been served this wine at a pre-auction dinner in Los Angeles a day or two before and had also been suspicious about whether such a wine had actually been made by Ponsot. The three of us then decided we needed to get in touch with Laurent Ponsot, whom all of us knew well. Laurent was startled to hear that Acker was about to auction wines his family had, he assured us, never made.
We agreed I would call John Kapon to tell him that the wines he was about to auction did not exist, and that he had to pull them from the sale—along with the rest of the Ponsot wines in the auction, as Laurent had by then reviewed the catalog, and believed the other Ponsot wines to be fraudulent as well. John was clearly not happy about this, though he agreed to do it. He did not, however, want to make any announcement ahead of the sale. In discussing this with Laurent, he decided that he should change the itinerary for his forthcoming trip to the US, and attend the auction, to make sure John carried through and the wines were in fact withdrawn.
The day of the auction, Rudy spent the morning at Sotheby’s, outbidding a few of us for some very old, and very real, Faiveley bottling—which before that auction had not commanded high prices. I strongly suspect that had his world not begun to unravel that evening, large quantities of counterfeit old Faiveleys would soon have begun appearing on the market alongside the Roumiers, Rousseaus and Ponsots, and at the newly elevated market prices. In any event, that evening, John Kapon did announce during the sale that the Ponsot wines had been withdrawn at the request of the domaine, without further elaboration. I will never forget the chorus of boos that greeted this announcement, apparently from bidders keen to purchase these never-before-seen rarities.
Had it not been for those bottles of Ponsot Clos St. Denis that never existed, Rudy might not be sitting in jail today. Wine fraud is extremely difficult to prove, and often a matter of expert opinion in an arcane field, hardly the stuff a prosecutor likes to take to court ( it was only after Rudy was arrested that the search of his home turned up “smoking gun” evidence that showed he was actively manufacturing fake bottles). What brought him to make these particular bottles? His imprecise knowledge of Burgundian history had come close to tripping him up at least once before, when he offered for sale bottles of ’23 Roumier Bonnes Mares—the domaine was founded in 1924—but he, or someone, dreamed up the un-disprovable story that because the domaine’s plot of Bonnes Mares had come as a dowry from Georges Roumier’s wife in 1924, it was also possible that her dowry included a yet-unbottled cask or more of the prior vintage’s wine as well. Unlikely, but given that the domaine had no records from that era, and the principals were long dead, not disprovable. Indeed, several things have made counterfeiting Burgundies easier than Bordeaux. Many now-revered producers did not use branded corks until relatively recent decades, generic capsules were often the norm, and labeling practices were seldom uniform or precise. Because a vintage (even one deemed great) was often not sold out on release, bottles might be kept in the cellar at the domaine for years, always without labels, and released whenever a buyer could be found. If by the time they were sold the label design had changed, the new label might be used, or older, blank labels onto which the vintage date might be stamped rather than printed. Other inconsistencies, depending on particular markets, were also not uncommon. No thought was given to preventing counterfeiting; the producers could barely sell the wines themselves, what incentive would someone else have to counterfeit them?
Also, in the period leading up to production of the fake Ponsots, Rudy apparently had begun to purchase vast quantities of negociant Burgundies from the ‘60s and earlier, much of it from Patriarche, a mediocre negociant with huge stocks of old wines that were selling for, at most, a few hundred dollars a bottle (I am told he similarly bought inexpensive old magnums of Pomerols and Medocs in great quantities). Thus, for example, a bottle of 1959 Patriarche Clos de la Roche, which an expert might well identify by taste as both ’59 and Clos de la Roche, could be rebaptised with a Ponsot label, resold for fifty times the price, and (unlike the bottle of purported ’59 Clos de la Roche that Allen and I had tasted in October 2006, which was clearly not from the ’59 vintage), the forgery would be much harder to detect.
The older Ponsot Clos St. Denis, however, had never existed. After the auction, at John Kapon’s request, Laurent, John, Rudy and I had lunch, John’s idea being that Rudy could explain to Laurent where he had gotten these wines. At the luncheon, despite Laurent’s polite but insistent questioning, Rudy remained vague and evasive, claiming he needed to check to see where he got these wines (this from someone who remembered virtually every bottle he ever drank or bought!), telling Laurent he would give him the information but putting him off as long as he could, before ultimately (some months later) handing him a fake name and phone numbers. However, before we left, Rudy pulled me aside, and asked me a question that gave the game away: didn’t I remember, he asked, a particular bottle that he had purchased a couple of years earlier, after outbidding Don Stott? It was a ’47 Ponsot Clos St. Denis. Didn’t that show that Ponsot must have been making Clos St. Denis at least as far back as ’47? I confess I smirked a bit as I informed him that in fact I did remember the bottle, and because I was interested I had looked into it; while it was only catalogued as “Ponsot”, in fact the producer of that bottle was “Christine Ponsot,” no relation to Laurent or the Domaine, but rather a label used by a negociant (Emile Chandesais, Christine Ponsot’s husband) with a stock of older Burgundies to sell.
After the story of his attempt to sell the fake Ponsots became the subject of several press reports, Rudy seemed to go underground, and there were rumors he had for a time left the country. Meanwhile, Laurent Ponsot pursued his quest to discover the source of the fake wines, developing evidence that, he believes, will ultimately show that Rudy did not act alone. Laurent has throughout been tenacious, principled, and, sadly, often alone—for reasons I do not understand, his fellow producers seemed to take the attitude that counterfeiting of their wines was not something they needed to concern themselves with. Some of this may reflect the fact that many producers who have become celebrities of the wine world are uncomfortable in that role, and with the new world of trophy drinking in general, still viewing themselves as farmers whose job is to produce the best wine possible, and to sell it to support their families; anything else they see as a distraction that, given all the pressures on their time, they can ill-afford. Only recently has that mind-set begun to change and the threat to their reputations from fraud begun to be taken more seriously.
Rudy’s wines again resurfaced in the fall of 2009 when Christie’s brought a significant amount of them to market. (According to the initial Complaint filed by the Government in arresting him, Rudy had previously sold a number of these wines to a California collector, identified elsewhere as Andy Gordon, who tried to put them back to Rudy after becoming suspicious, but ultimately agreed to be repaid out of the proceeds of a sale by Rudy of these wines at Christie’s, where Rudy was never identified as the source of the wines.) However, a number of people, including Don Cornwell and Geoffrey Troy, recognized the wines as being from Rudy, and raised with Christie’s the issue of how they could sell these wines at auction, especially without disclosing the source. I also spoke with several people at Christie’s about this. It seemed then, as it does now, pure folly to risk tainting their reputation on an insubstantial aspect of their overall business, but Christies’ management decided otherwise, and went on to offer these wines at several sales in the US and abroad.
Because I had assumed that the Christie’s bottles were bottles Rudy or Mr. Gordon had been holding when the music stopped in April 2008, it did not occur to me that Rudy was still in the business of manufacturing and selling rare wines, until someone asked me if I had seen the catalog for the Spectrum London auction scheduled for early February of this year. One look at the on-line catalog was enough to convince me that these were yet more of the same Rudy bottlings (after a while, they got to have a recognizable look). I discussed this with Geoffrey Troy and Don Cornwell, and Don threw himself into this, eventually producing an amazing compendium of flaws in the purported DRCs on sale at Spectrum, which he then published as a vinous “J’Accuse” on the Wineberserkers bulletin board. (As an aside, the wine world owes Don Cornwell an enormous debt of gratitude for his incredible commitment to bringing this story to light, and for his continuing efforts to root out the many tentacles of Rudy’s fraud.) Don also collected evidence that the wines were being sold by Rudy through an intermediary, and that he had been using this route to sell wines through Spectrum for quite some time. Much has now been said on this subject, which can be followed at length on Wineberserkers and elsewhere. Unfortunately, Spectrum (which issued a series of wholly implausible denials), its London auction partner Vanquish, and their “experts” who authenticated these bottles, have yet to suffer fully the richly deserved consequences of their own arrogance and stupidity—or in this case, perhaps cupidity is the more appropriate word. Nonetheless, the uproar surrounding that sale galvanized action on the part of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, its UK and US agents, and the Domaine Comte de Vogüé, to have numerous questionable wines removed from the sale, finally overcoming the stonewalling that had initially greeted Cornwell’s revelations. Perhaps more importantly, the revelation that Rudy was continuing, with seeming impunity, to manufacture and sell millions of dollars of counterfeit wine in the marketplace, may have played a significant role in the government’s decision to arrest him.
What to make of this sorry history? Is it just another story about some gullible rich guys with more money than taste getting ripped off by a clever con artist? Partly, perhaps, but also I think you have to be part of the wine culture to understand the strong spirit of generosity among collectors. Wine, unlike many collectibles, cannot simply be fondled and then put back on the shelf; to be enjoyed, it needs to be opened, and that enjoyment is multiplied by sharing. Of course, there are some who are content to create mausoleums in their basements, where they can show off their treasures but never open any; but those are bottle collectors, not wine lovers. Among true wine aficionados, sharing bottles is a way of life (and if showing off sometimes vies with true generosity as a motive, well, that’s part of human nature too). What Rudy did, however, was to pervert that generous spirit into nothing more than another con game, and among its after-effects is a climate of suspicion that will last a long time, as each old bottle is held under a microscope and its flaws, real or imagined, debated. Even more unfortunately, thousands of fake bottles have made their way into collections world-wide and they will continue to surface, slowly, for many years to come. On the positive side, one can hope that exposing this fraud will galvanize action by the producers, both to play a more active role in helping to identify fraudulent older bottles, and to employ technologies that already exist to protect the legitimacy of the wines being produced today. If that occurs, then perhaps this long sad tale will not have a completely unhappy ending.
© 2012 Douglas E. Barzelay
A few years ago, after having played some role in exposing the attempted sale of a substantial number of fake Ponsot wines at auction, I recounted that story, with indignation, to a friend of mine who is a senior executive at a consumer products company. Why, he asked, was I surprised that people were faking expensive bottles of wine? “They’re out there faking our toothpaste.”
Ours is a world awash in fraudulent goods, but when it involves something closer to our hearts than a Rolex watch, we feel more aggrieved. Old wine, and especially old Burgundy, has been a passion of mine for a long time, and because for many years few people were interested, one could drink great old bottles of Burgundy with a minimum of concern, even during the years when rare old Bordeaux were being routinely faked. Unfortunately, sometime around the middle of the last decade, as Burgundy prices boomed, a small cottage industry began to produce significant quantities of old-vintage fakes, beginning inevitably with older DRCs (especially large formats) and de Vogüés, then infecting Jayer, Roumier, Rousseau, Ponsot and others. The auction houses that sold wines reacted in varying ways, but while one or two had the knowledge to spot the fakes and the character to refuse them, most turned a blind eye for as long as they could. Eventually, though, the glare of publicity, and several lawsuits, turned most of the auction houses considerably more cautious.
The fake Ponsots catalyzed a glare of attention on the forgeries, and for a time there seemed to be far fewer fraudulent old Burgundies on the market—and focus, in any case, seemed diverted as new markets in Asia went wild over 1982 Lafite and other Bordeaux, and the auction houses rushed to serve this new and burgeoning market. Nonetheless, those manufacturing the fake Burgundies had never been caught, and it appears that, emboldened by the emergence of a new, rich and unsophisticated cadre of collectors, they are back in business at the same old stand.
Too often markets that lack an effective regulatory mechanism—which may be sophisticated consumers or other gatekeepers, just as much as external, or even internal, regulators—become a race to the bottom (for which the mortgage “industry” still serves as a painful example). In the wine world, the recent Spectrum/Vanquish auction in London (February 8) was the wine auction world’s sorry example of this, as the auction house put on sale a large number of seemingly rare Burgundies with what turned out to be a highly questionable provenance. After trumpeting their alleged stringent vetting of these wines, they tried their best (or worst) to ignore the well-documented warnings of outside commentators before granting some credence, albeit both grudging and only partial, to the further warnings of several Burgundy domaines and their representatives. Yet as Don Cornwell has amply documented, the withdrawn lots were only a part of a much larger whole to which adequate (or even cursory) vetting seems not to have been applied. (Full disclosure—I was one of Don’s sources for information in comparing these questionable bottles with wines of known authenticity, though it is Don who deserves full credit for the thorough investigation he performed.)
While I suspect that the reverberations from that auction may continue for some time, it also makes sense to begin asking what can be done, if not to eliminate, at least to minimize, the amount of fraudulent wine that reaches the market.
The question for the auction houses is simple: do they not have a responsibility, from a business standpoint even if not a legal one, to their customers (buyers), to take reasonable measures to assure the quality and authenticity of what they sell? Certainly, they all concur in wanting us as buyers to think they do, with their staffs of “specialists” and their vivid catalog descriptions of long hours examining dusty bottles. Yet with few exceptions, this remains more in the realm of puffing than of actuality. What will change this? As are others, I am skeptical of the government’s ability to impose such responsibilities other than in the most ham-handed of fashions. On the other hand, self-regulation would require that the leading auction houses abide by uniform standards, which they seem reluctant to do for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, the issue is not going to go away, and the auction houses need to face up to it. While I don’t profess to have a neat set of answers, I would, in the interests of starting a dialogue, proffer a few observations and suggestions:
–wine fraud is never going to be totally eradicated. There’s just too much money in it, and those who think this is just a rich man’s game are dreaming; there’s plenty of it going on at more affordable levels. Nonetheless, the auction houses should provide a relatively safe zone for the trade in mature wines, not a wild-west atmosphere.
–the art market may provide some useful analogies. That market is still largely self-regulated. It is certainly not a perfect market, and fraud is still a serious issue. At least, however, it is an issue that is taken seriously. In the auction process provenance is typically carefully scrutinized, and not only do the auction houses and dealers take their vetting processes seriously, but a substantial role is played by outside experts who do not have an economic interest in the sale. For major artists, these third party experts are effectively gatekeepers, and the absence of a third party imprimatur can be an obvious signal to reasonably sophisticated buyers that there is likely to be a problem.
–while the wine auction business has largely paid lip service to the expertising process (though a couple of houses actually do take it seriously), the truth is the wine departments have had a lot of merchandise to move and a small number of underpaid and undertrained specialists, and have often failed to pay the attention to authentication needed to do the job correctly. At the same time, many of the consumers who have been spending large amounts at auction have had neither the time nor the detailed knowledge to do any serious due diligence–a lot of money was and is being freely spent by people who quite frankly are not sophisticated about what they’re buying. This relative lack of gatekeepers, or the demand for them, was what in my view opened the door for those who saw an opportunity to produce fraudulent bottles, and who really didn’t need to be too fastidious about the quality of the fakes they were producing.
–what can be done? If the auction houses truly want to get serious about this issue, then at a minimum, they need to hire a truly independent (and experienced) third party to vet the expensive/questionable bottles. Because of its widespread use in the art world, the idea of independent expert review will certainly not be a novelty to the large auction houses and if it became the norm there would be a viable business for a few different experts to do this for multiple auction houses and collectors. For it to work properly, however, there would need to be far greater cooperation from the producers. One of the difficult parts of the exercise in reviewing the Spectrum bottles was identifying reference standard labels, bottles, etc. Building a reliable database of information is going to be key to any such effort. The Domaines can be a huge help in this, and I think (hope) they would be more willing to do so, if the information were being given to third parties of known reliability. I would certainly hope, for example, that those campaigning for recognition of Burgundy as a world heritage site would not be short-sighted about the importance of preserving that heritage once its fruits are bottled and move out into the world.
–what is the appropriate standard of “authenticity”? There was a good deal of discussion on wineberserkers.com (where Don Cornwell first exposed the problems with the Spectrum/Vanquish auction) about whether DRC itself should “authenticate” wines, much of it unfortunately proceeding from the unstated, but incorrect, premise that this is something DRC could readily do if only it were willing to devote the resources to the task. While a number of Burgundy producers are at work on technologies that in the future may serve to prove whether a bottle is or is not what it purports to be, those experiments belong to this century. For older bottles, while an expert who examines a bottle should be able to tell if there are signs that it may not be what it purports to be, there are no comparable signs which would allow one to state with certainty that a bottle is “authentic.” Indeed, until relatively recently, few Burgundy producers had to concern themselves with fraudulent bottles (DRC was not even a profitable enterprise until sometime in the 1960s), which meant they were mostly concerned with how they would sell their production, not whether someone would be motivated to counterfeit it. Also, labeling practices in Burgundy were not always uniform, as wines might not be sold until years after the vintage, when new labels might be printed—although the existence of legitimate variations does not mean that all variations are legitimate. Other than branding corks, which only a few producers did at that time, no significant steps were taken to deter counterfeiting. But corks can be falsely branded, false labels can be printed (and made to look old), and of course corks, labels, capsules and bottles can all be pulled out of the dumpster and reused. As just one example, I have tasted a bottle of 1945 Rousseau Chambertin (so it said on the label), with a correct period bottle, capsule, label and even a branded cork—only what was in the bottle was not ’45 and not Chambertin. Of course, the best way to positively authenticate a bottle, without consuming it, is to have a clear record of its provenance. However, to ask a domaine, or outside expert, to say by examining the exterior of an old bottle of unknown provenance that what is inside is “authentic” is to ask them to do something beyond their capability. For this reason, what some auction houses have established as the operative criterion is not whether the bottles are authentic but whether they are sellable at auction. The key distinction is that one only has to establish that the bottle lacks adequate provenance, or presents issues of authenticity, to exclude it.
–The vetting process will not be foolproof, and liability issues for the experts need to be considered carefully. Two other problems are time—auction houses and collectors are going to have to adjust to longer lead times–and over-exclusion: i.e., the vetting process is by its nature going to require setting aside as unsellable not just obvious fakes, but also bottles whose provenance is murky, or that have questionable variations, but that may nonetheless be authentic and provide great drinking experiences.
–This problemof potential over-exclusion suggests that there may be a better way to look at this issue. Sotheby’s may currently do the best job of vetting its wine sales, but does anyone else share my view that these sales tend to be rather boring, especially for those whose interests in Burgundy extend beyond recent vintages of DRC and a handful of others? Once the obvious fakes are excluded, I think there still needs to be a “safe” market for those bottles that are neither of impeccable provenance, nor counterfeit—it just has to be a market in which they find their own level, and are not (as now) marketed and priced as if they had lain in some cold country house cellar since release. The possible model for achieving this is very different from the one the auction houses currently employ, and one that takes its cue from the securities industry: full disclosure of all material facts that would affect a reasonable buyer’s decision. Presumably, if everything relevant about provenance, condition and storage, is disclosed, then informed buyers can make their own decisions, and bottles will find different price levels depending on the perceived risk. This approach was used to some extent years ago by Chicago Wine Company, in its “caveat emptor” section—mostly bottles with severe ullage, or potential seepage, etc. but there’s no reason not to extend this to wines that, for example, have traded multiple times, or that seem correct but lack information on where they’ve been. Let those bottles find their own price level, based on honest reporting—the auction house has to say what it knows, after reasonable due diligence, and what it can’t find out (for example if sellers don’t have, or won’t produce, any records of purchase, that would be disclosed). It must be clear, though, that this is not just a variant of willful blindness. What should raise red (if not black) flags, is a complete lack of any information on the provenance of rare and expensive bottles. The silence of Spectrum/Vanquish on this point had to be disturbing to anyone concerned about authenticity—evidently including DRC among others. Real due diligence has to be a cornerstone of this approach, and I would advocate this be overseen by truly independent third parties, as a part of the expert review process outlined above, and not by in-house personnel whose compensation, or indeed continued employment, may be conditioned on their pliability. Nor should the auction houses be able to rely on “captive” third parties, whose retention similarly may depend on telling the auction house what it wants to hear.
–If the auction houses (or some of them) were willing to adopt this approach, then while certain sellers would for obvious reasons flee into the shadows, it could have several positives (beyond simply being the right and honest thing to do). First, I think it would provide a competitive advantage in terms of dealing with buyers, because buyers would presumably prefer to deal with a source they could trust (indeed, it might help bring to the auction market the large number of collectors who today regard the auction houses as a place to dump their trash, not as a source they would seriously consider buying from). Second, it would obviate the liability issues that are sure to be coming the way of auction houses that persist in dealing with fraudulent goods even when warned; and third, it might obviate the perception of a need to impose liability on all the auction houses through new laws and regulations.
— There will be several challenges for the auction houses in adopting such an approach. The first is the often chaotic nature of the auction process for wine, where large amounts of wine may arrive last minute, and all have to be appropriately examined for identification of the wine, label conditions, capsule conditions, etc. Slowing down the process while an expert chews over the most desirable bottles is not going to be appealing to the auction houses, but in fact right now some auction houses are doing this, and it doesn’t seem to measurably affect their ability to bring quality consignments to auction. Second, there is a risk of overkill in that small consignments of wines with no known counterfeit issues should not need to be subjected to the same depth of examination as large consignments of Lafite, DRC, etc. The biggest issue for the auction houses will likely be that of naming sellers, and others in the chain of title. While I would point out that even now, if you’re a big enough customer, the auction houses will quietly tell you who the seller is, there is concededly a big difference between that and publication, and it is one that clearly would hurt their ability to attract consignors. Nor is this just about questionable consignors not wanting to be identified; I have known plenty of people with great collections who would have balked if they thought that their moment of financial distress would become obvious to the world. However, this may not be as large a problem as it seems. On one side of the equation, some major consignors already understand the utility of attaching their names to their collections, and on the other, the number of bad actors whose names are widely recognized in the collector community is actually fairly small. So something would have to be worked out so that more information about consignors and others in the chain would be available in enough detail for it to be obvious when a bad actor was in the chain, but without clearly identifying individuals who have a reasonable expectation of privacy; nonetheless this seems like something that, once again, could adequately be controlled by a third party gatekeeper.
To summarize, I think that a system can be worked out to prevent most frauds, without legislative intervention—provided a critical mass of auction houses would be willing to do so. If I’m right, then given their current reluctance to step up, what may be needed is a little “gentle” encouragement from us, their customers—by making our preferences known in the way they will best understand, through our patronage of those who will stand up and do the right thing, and refusal to do business with those who won’t.
2008 Revisited, and Other Notes
In last year’s vintage report, I noted the difficulties of tasting the 2008s in November 2009:
“Malos often did not finish until August or September, and in a few cases were not finished even at the time of our visit in mid-November ….Many of the wines we tasted had only recently been racked, or were in need of a racking, and as a result were much more difficult to assess than is typically true at this time of year. In addition, the vintage is characterized by high acidities, and often as well by dry tannins, which frequently made tasting a chore and left one’s palate exhausted at the end of the day. More importantly, it made judgment difficult. In the best of times, barrel tasting is an inexact art ….This year, it is even more problematic, and one kept wishing for the opportunity to taste these wines in 3 months, when they surely will have become less obdurate.”
While the main focus of our trip in November 2010 was on the ’09s, we did have an opportunity to taste a good sampling of ’08s, and I am happy to report that there are a number of wines that have turned out well, especially among the whites, but also among the reds. That said, on the red side my view is more one of relief that there are wines that will give pleasure, rather than that this is somehow a great, underrated terroir vintage. While I heard many comparisons of 2008 to 2001 during our trip, I am not convinced that 2008 is at the same level as 2001. Of course, when making comparisons, one has first to define what is being compared, and while 2001 was a very uneven vintage in the Côte-de-Nuits, and problematic (among the reds) in the Côte-de-Beaune, I think that among the producers that I follow in the Côte-de-Nuits, their 2001s are ultimately better balanced, more serious wines than their 2008s. Nonetheless, time will tell, so for those of you who disagree, come back in twenty years and let me know what you think! As for the whites, this is an interesting vintage, with some first-rate wines but also a lot of wines that are still unbalanced and acidic. Above all, careful selection is critical.
REDS:
Michel Gaunoux: I never know quite where in my reports to include Michel Gaunoux, as they make a point of not showing wines in barrel, and their focus is generally on vintages that have been in bottle for quite some time. However, as they did begin this year with their ’08s, I include them here. The Pommard Grands Epenots had bright red fruit on the nose and palate, lively acidity and good balance (90), while the Corton Renardes, if a touch light for a grand cru, was quite charming, with notes of cherry and spice and added depth on a long finish (91). The ’05 Pommard Grands Epenots and Rugiens were in a different league: the former with a dense brooding, earthy and minerally nose, but lots of fruit on the palate, a sense of raciness, and excellent weight and density (93)—the makings of a delicious Pommard in 30 years!–and the latter showing lovely red fruit, minerals and perfume, with a beautiful transparency, earthy, medium weight yet powerful and tightly wound (94). The 2005 Corton Renardes was also very nice, but lacked a little elegance (92). An ’03 Pommard Grands Epenots was surprisingly forward and drinkable despite the tannins (89-90), while the ’03 Rugiens seemed much more serious, with a perfumed quality, excellent minerality and a great fruit finish, not overripe, tannins relatively in check, and also drinkable now though it will improve (93). An ’01 Pommard Rugiens had all the elements, but seemed still shut down and unready (90?). A ’98 Corton Renardes was foxy, alright, but not in a good way (84), while an ’88 Pommard Epenots had black fruit, earth and minerals, possibly a bit unbalanced to acid but the tannins at least were fairly resolved for an ’88 (90+). The last wine served was a mystery vintage of Pommard Rugiens, with rich red fruit, minerals, spice and a touch of VA on the nose, and wonderful sweet fruit plus prominent minerality on the palate, and despite a hint of sous-bois on the palate, it was complete, silky and charming (94). Your faithful correspondent earned himself considerable brownie points with the Gaunoux—but alas, not a free bottle—by correctly guessing the vintage, 1947.
Dujac: Jacques Seysses, while not quite admitting that ’07 was a very weak vintage for this domaine, expressed great pride in the ’08s, saying he felt that Dujac was near the top in the vintage. The Morey Village had a lot of rich red fruit, some green olives, and good minerality, tho a somewhat dry finish (87). Gevrey Combottes was excellent if a bit dry at the finish, though with plenty of sweet fruit after (90+), and I liked it a bit better than the Charmes-Chambertin, which despite some nice red cherry fruit on the nose, was very meaty, with a lot of dry tannins at the back (88). The Vosne Malconsorts showed nice medium weight, sweet red cherries, minerality, spice and a touch of the stems, with a lovely spicy red fruit finish, light tannins and slight dryness on the finish (92). Regrettably, we had to leave for our next appointment before we could wrest the Clos-de-la-Roche or Clos-St.-Denis away from les journalistes (Messrs. Meadows and Kolm) in the adjoining cellar.
Grivot: We had the opportunity to taste a range of ’08s here, and they were quite interesting to see. The Vosne Village did not seem well put together (84) and the Vosne Beaumonts, while pleasant, seemed dry at the back (87) but the Nuits Boudots was a very nice wine, with an excellent nose of spice and strawberries, and an earthy, minerally and transparent palate, with the tannins in check even though there was slight dryness at the end (91). The Clos-de-Vougeot had a subdued nose of strawberries and spice, minerality and good balance, and the fierce tannins of a year ago seemed to be rounding out a bit (90+). The Echézeaux seemed pleasant but less interesting (89), while the Richebourg was quite powerful, and dense for an ’08, and though the tannins were prominent, the red fruit on the finish superceded them (92).
Hudelot-Noellat: Another nice range of ’08s, beginning with a spicy Chambolle Village (88), a rather subdued and unforthcoming Chambolle Charmes (87), and a lighter-style Nuits Meurgers with nice strawberry fruit and earth notes, slightly dry at the end (88). The Vosne Beaumonts had a very pretty red fruit nose, and good minerality, though it too was a tad dry at the finish (90). Clos-de-Vougeot had good density and sweet fruit, good balance and the tannins were not overbearing (91), and Romanee-St.-Vivant had lovely red fruit and spice and was rich, elegant and long (92). To me, this range epitomized a lot of the better ’08s I saw: very nice, with good fruit and transparency, but still a lot of tannin and acidity to work through and clearly not the depth or balance of a top-quality vintage.
Lafarge: Not much at the lower or even middle levels: a Bourgogne that seemed a bit underripe; a Volnay Village that also seemed slightly underripe but had nice minerality; a Beaune Aigrots that had good transparency and was long if slightly tannic; a Beaune Grèves that had a good perfumed nose but a hardness on the palate that would not give up; a Volnay Mitans that was perfumed, but in the style of a painted lady, earthy and coarse; and a Volnay Clos-du-Château- des-Ducs that had more moderate tannins, but also a lack of structure in the middle. Things got much better with the Volnay Clos-des-Chênes, with spice, black cherries and minerals on the nose, a balanced minerally wine with more covered tannins (90?) and the Volnay Caillerets, which was very transparent, a slight bit chunky on the mid-palate but not obtrusively so, and had a lovely finish of black cherries and minerals, with tannins modulated (90).
Lambrays: I include the Domaine des Lambrays here because it is a good example of the less successful side of ’08. 100% whole clusters were used here in ’08, and the results are dry, tannic wines that certainly aren’t showing much balance at any level: Morey Village (86), Morey 1er Cru Les Loups (87) or Clos-des-Lambrays (?).
Liger-Belair: While the ’08 Vosne Reignots seemed at this stage to be cloaked in an impenetrable armor of oak, the Echézeaux was much more forthcoming, with light cherry flavors, strong minerally acidity, and good spice, and of course plenty of tannin after (90), while La Romanée showed excellent Vosne spicebox character, nice transparency, and a defter touch of oak; it is a lighter style of La Romanée, but the tannins are not overdone and it should round out nicely (91-92).
Georges Mugneret-Gibourg: Given the steadily high quality of the winemaking at this domaine, I see these wines as a bellwether for the vintage: weaker at the lower levels, very nice for the most part among the premier and grand crus, but rarely exciting. The Bourgogne was not fully balanced (82) and the Vosne Village was barnyardy and seemed under-ripe (?) but things improved considerably from there. The Nuits Les Vignerondes was light but pure (88) and the Chaignots had light sweet fruit and minerals, citrus and spice and a nice minerally earthy finish (88+), while the Chambolle Feusellottes had very nice light Chambolle fruit on the nose, with good minerality, excellent equilibrium, a touch of hardness on the finish but also spicy sweet fruit (89). The Echézeaux had good balance, red fruit, a chocolate note, some citrus and acid at the end but overall was a pleasant wine (91). The Gevrey 1er Cru (young vines Ruchottes) had good presence and transparency and a decent amount of fruit (90), and while there was more complexity to the Ruchottes, with purity and balance, it seemed a little sappy and dry on the back, and so I scored it the same as the jeunes vignes (90). The Clos-de-Vougeot was very minerally, a touch meaty, with light spice and citrus; though it seemed slightly ponderous, it had a lot to it, with surprisingly silky tannins and a nice pure citrus and mineral finish (91+).
Mugnier: Another bellwether. The Chambolle Villages had pleasant fruit, but was a bit dry and short (87); the Nuits Clos des Fourches was also a bit light, rustic but also pleasant (86), and the Nuits Clos-de-la-Maréchale seemed to me to have too much rustic tannin despite its sweet rich fruit (87). The Chambolle Fuées, however, was a lovely wine, if slightly simple (89) and the Bonnes-Mares was earthy and minerally, with spice and black cherries, a nicely blanced wine that reminded me in style of a ’98 (90). The Chambolle Amoureuses was a big step up, with lovely red fruit and spice on the nose, minerals, anise and a long spicy finish—there is a lot of charm in this wine (92). The Musigny had deep red fruit, spice and minerals on the nose, lovely weight and gracefulness to it, a fairly dense wine with a vibrant finish and still a lot of tannin, again analogous to the ’98 in its overall quality level though not necessarily in its flavor profile (92-93).
Roumier: These wines were showing far better than a year earlier. Christophe thinks his ’08s will drink soon. The Chambolle Village had a lot of lovely red fruit, if slight sappiness at the end (87), while the Chambolle Les Cras was much more serious, with light spicy fruit on the nose and palate, a touch of lavender, and acidity that is clearly present but not overwhelming, leading to a spicy finish (90). The Chambolle Amoureuses had a lovely nose of small berry fruit and deep spice; on the palate there were also hints of smoke and wild mushrooms, and good minerality, with the acidity not overwhelming; on the finish the tannins seemed slightly hard but there was luscious fruit there as well (92-93). The Bonnes-Mares started with an odd hint of buttered popcorn but then became dense and minerally with both red and black fruit notes, while on the palate it was intense and spicy (93+?); I thought it had more to it in terms of density than any other ’08 I tasted this trip (which unfortunately did not include a revisit of the DRC or Rousseau ’08s tasted last year).
Other ’08 Reds: A very transparent Clos-des-Epeneaux from Comte Armand, though showing some heavy tannins at the end (90) and a Nuits Aux Thoreys from Benjamin Leroux that showed great purity on the nose, ripe fruit and earth, citrus, and a reasonable level of tannin (90); a spicy Clos-de-Tart, with sweet red fruit, still a bit high in acidity (89); only two wines from Méo, neither showing at all: a funky, stripped Vosne Village with very dry tannins (82) and the unfortunate Nuits Aux Argillas I referred to in my report on the ’09s (70); from Chateau de la Tour, a regular Clos-de-Vougeot that seemed a bit marked by the stems, with good minerality but dry tannins (87) and a Clos-de-Vougeot Vielles Vignes that had nice purity, density and depth, with spice and cherry fruit and finer tannins than the regular version (89-90); and a decidedly mixed bag from Trapet, beginning with a Gevrey L’Ostrea and a Gevrey Clos Prieur, both opened two days earlier, that showed chemical notes, then a Chapelle-Chambertin that had transparency but also quite strong tannins, and a Latricières-Chambertin that seemed quite representative of the vintage in that it had nice transparency but a bit too much acid and not quite enough fruit (88), and finally a Chambertin that displayed an aristocratic nose, a lot of very precise fruit and minerals, but just too much acidity to achieve balance (89-90).
WHITES:
Côte-de-Beaune
Leflaive: While the bottling here normally takes place in the spring, the ’08s were not bottled until just before our visit, because of the prolonged malos. Interestingly, the Meursault 1er Cru Sous le Dos d’Âne (from a vineyard planted to pinot noir until 1995, with a little even remaining until 2002) had a rich, creamy, bacon fat nose, a lot of minerals and spice, and a strong strike of acid in back (90). The Puligny Combettes, while showing a lot of SO2 that for the time being seemed to suppress the nose a bit, was very minerally, with excellent weight, energy and drive. There is a good bit of acidity at the finish, and this wine needs time (91+). Antoine Lepetit believes that 2008 has more maturity and concentration than 1996; if true, it portends a brilliant future for these wines.
Lambrays: A fairly nice Folatières, with a hint of apricots, soft for an ’08 with lots of white flowers, but more tension than the ’09 (89-90). The Clos du Caillerets, however, had a curious note of torrefaction on both the nose and palate, and a touch of caramel, which I disliked (84).
Latour-Giraud: Though the Meursault Cuvée Charles Maxime and the Narvaux were not showing particularly well, and the Genevrieres had an off-putting note of asparagus on the palate, the Meursault Charmes showed well, with good minerality covered by white flowers, apples and spice (90), as did the Meursault Genevrières Cuvée des Pierre, with hints of wildflowers, stones and honey on the nose; on the palate it was somewhat brooding but very pure, with a stony element but a nice balancing floral component and a touch of spice—a concentrated wine that needs time to come together (92). By contrast, the nose of the Meursault Perrières leapt out of the glass, with notes of stoniness, white flowers, anise and pear; on the palate it had similar notes, great balance and a spicy long finish—a long distance runner (93-94).
Bernard Moreau: The ’08s here (as at several other stops) very much outclassed the ’09s. The Chassagne Maltroie had some nice peach spice, ginger and a hint of clove, along with some fat but lots of minerally acidity to balance (91), while the Chassagne Chenevottes was more restrained on the nose, but had a creamy texture notwithstanding the acidity, a lot of power, and a licorice note on the finish (91). The Chassagne Vergers ran more to russet apples, with a dense, driven minerality, though a touch of dryness on the finish led me to mark it slightly below the two prior wines (90). Still more impressive were the Chassagne Morgeots, with spicy apples and smoke on the nose, and powerful, sweet fruit to balance the minerality, plus a long fruit-driven finish, very pure, and needing two years or more (93), and the Chassagne Grands-Ruchottes, with a brilliant nose of spice and white flowers, and great balance and delicacy on the palate, a wine that stays up gracefully on its feet (94).
Paul Pillot: I wish we had had a chance to sample more ‘08s here. The three we did see all had more weight than the ‘09s. The Chassagne Clos St.-Jean had a spicy, floral nose with good balance (89-90), while the Chassagne Grande Montagne had a penetrating nose of spice, honey and lemon cream, became even creamier on the palate, and ended with a dry minerally finish (90). Best was the Chassagne Caillerets, with anise, minerals, spice and lemon on the nose, a lot of tension on the palate, a floral touch, and a racy, tense minerally finish, with great drive—“my kind of white Burg,” I noted(92).
DRC: Tasting the prior vintage Montrachet was a pleasure we don’t always get at the Domaine. The nose had spice, honeysuckle, pain d’épice and minerals; these carried through on the rich and complex palate, with a hint of sweet plums as well as a touch of oak at the back, and the finish was powerful and extremely long, with pain d’épice, minerals and bracing acidity—Aubert noted that this is one of the most minerally Montrachets the Domaine has ever made. For me, though, there is a slight hint of fattiness that makes it not quite in the class of the ’96. (93-94).
Roulot: This was one of the few domaines where I tended to prefer the ’09s to the ’08s. The Meursault Luchets had a rich nose of honeysuckle, smoke and a touch of bacon fat; on the palate, there was an asparagus note I didn’t care for, with minerals after, and a short finish (84). To pause here, we also tasted the ’07 Luchets, a far better wine, with minerals, anise, spice and fat in the nose, a ripe and round wine with nevertheless a minerally streak, and a long minerally finish (90). Jean-Marc commented that the ’07 was “very Roulot.” We then retasted the ’09 Luchets, and while it was more linear than the ’07 it had more weight and intensity, and may well have more potential than the ’07; the ’08 was a very distant third in this race. We then segued back to the ’08s, with a Meursault Tessons Clos de Mon Plaisir that had a vegetal note on the nose and artichokes on the finish, though some good minerality and tension (86), and a decent but not exciting Meursault Perrières, with smoke and a hint of cardoons on the nose, a lot of flesh for an ’08, minerals, red currants and allspice on the medium-weight palate, and a finish with spice, slate and a hint of caramel (88).
Chablis
Fevre: We only tasted two ’08s, but they clearly overshadowed anything we tasted among the ’09s. The Bougros (Côte de Bouguerots) was much spicier than the ’09 version, with more acidity in evidence as well, an intense rich racy but balanced wine, leaner than ’09 though there was sweet fruit in evidence, with a long minerally uncompromising finish (92). Didier Séguier thought it was the best Côte de Bouguerots in the twelve years since Bouchard had taken over the estate. Les Clos, while not giving too much away just yet, had even more depth—more “civilized” than the Côte de Bouguerots, with notes of apples, spice, pears and minerals, a large-framed wine, with pain d’épice and brioche on the finish; this wine needs time (93+).
Christian Moreau: While the ’08 bottles we tasted had been open for several days, they were holding relatively well—indeed in a couple of cases still seemed relatively unforthcoming. The Chablis Vaudésir, from relatively young vines, was slightly toasty on the nose and very minerally and powerful, if a bit dry at the finish (90), while the Chablis Valmur seemed very cool and austere, not especially forthcoming or knit, though perhaps it will come together in time (89?). Les Clos was considerably better, and despite a discreet nose of toast and gingerbread, it had lovely weight, knife-edge minerality, and a rich, long, if slightly hot finish (92). Best of all, though, was the Clos des Hospices, with a nose of spice, licorice, minerals and a touch of honey, lovely weight and balance between the fruit and minerality on the palate, and a long, spicy finish (95).
Other ’08 Whites: Among the other ’08 whites we tasted were a pleasant Corton Blanc from Senard, with some nice spice and minerals, a touch of sweetness and a nice minerally finish with good cut (though the ’07 was better), and a surprisingly good ’08 Chablis Montée de Tonnerre from La Chablisienne (I found it more racy and appealing than either the Vaudésir or the Preuses from the same source).
An Update (If You Can Call It That) on Premox: Finally, and sadly, no report on white Burgundies is complete without a note about premature oxidation. In brief, the problem continues, with the ’02s becoming increasingly affected and some of the ’04s beginning to show signs of it as well. While, as I reported last year, the focus has partly shifted from the corks, as concerns are increasingly voiced that various elements of the winemaking process have been making the wines more susceptible to oxidation, and that the cork issues then determined which and how many of the resulting bottles would be affected. Much attention is now being focused on the pressing process, with the theory being advanced that the wines are not getting enough exposure to oxygen early on, and that, as with children, exposure at a young age to certain maladies helps build greater immunity to them later in life (this is not to ignore the role of other factors, particularly earlier in this ongoing saga, such as increased use of battonage and lowered SO2 levels, but these are not currently issues for the better producers). While more producers are admitting that there is a problem, denial itself remains an issue, particularly as sales do not yet seem to be seriously affected. The mixed mindset of many Burgundians was strikingly evidenced in one cellar we visited, where the producer, among the most thoughtful in the region, had just finished telling us about an experiment he was conducting beginning with his ’09s to see if (to greatly simplify what he is doing) changes in the winemaking process that would expose the wine to more oxygenation early on would, in effect, inoculate the wine from future problems. It sounded like a very interesting experiment but it will take years to see if it’s working (the producer asked not to be named until he has some indication of the results). After this discussion, he served us one of his ’02s, which we found to be seriously premoxed. Before serving us another bottle, he asked us to taste an ’04, and then retaste the ’02. He admitted that he had at first felt that our reaction to the ’02 was overblown, and might have resulted from the transition from ’09 to ’02, but as he went back to the ’02 he (somewhat reluctantly, it seemed) admitted we were right. He then opened a second bottle of the ’02, which also had a clear touch of premox, though it was not as prominent as the first, and a lively debate ensued in which the producer took view that we were overreacting and that the wine was still drinkable. My view, which I expressed to him then and continue to hold, is that while it might well have been “drinkable,” it was not what it is supposed to be, and furthermore not something one would voluntarily pay $100 or more for in a store, or several times that in a restaurant. I thought it a sad portent that a producer who on one level is at the forefront of recognizing and dealing with the problem, should on another level still be reluctant to acknowledge its effect on his own wines. Plus ça change….
From its early days, the 1990 vintage in Burgundy was hailed as a very great vintage, with the potential to become the finest vintage since perhaps 1959. The summer had been quite hot and dry, enough to retard maturation, but significant rain at the end of August and in early September restarted development and after three weeks of warm weather a large crop was harvested beginning in late September. In their youth, the reds seemed to be bursting with ripe fruit, and to have a depth and intensity that certainly had not been seen in Burgundy in quite some years. Yet as these wines began to reach adolescence, troubling signs emerged. The flavors often seemed baked, and increasingly one began to see wines whose fruit was drying up, leaving behind an empty shell. However, other wines remained youthful and bright, seeming to retain their early promise. Clearly, as the wines approached twenty years of age, it was a good time to assess the vintage. At a tasting held in Connecticut March 27-28, 2010, organized by Bob Feinn and benignly presided over by the buddha of Burgundy, Clive Coates, we sampled approximately 60 reds from 1990, in three sessions (we also tasted half a dozen whites; more about these later).
The first session included about a dozen wines from the Cote de Beaune, beginning with the Santenay Clos Tavannes of Pousse d’Or and including three Volnay 1er Crus from Hubert de Montille, Beaune Clos des Mouches from Drouhin, Pommard Grand Clos des Epenots from Courcel and Clos des Epeneaux from Comte Armand, and Corton Clos des Cortons from Faiveley. The dominant impression from all of these wines was of baked fruit, and a distressing lack of balance, with several beginning to show oxidative notes and others, most notably the Volnay Champans from de Montille, still retaining aggressive tannins. Most merited scores in the low 80s. Even the Lafarge Volnay Clos des Chenes, while showing some finesse, seemed to be beginning to dry out (89). The situation improved, but only slightly, when we arrived at the wines of the Cote de Nuits, with a pleasant if undistinguished Morey-St.-Denis En La Rue de Vergy from Bruno Clair (accompanied by a curious, almost non-Burgundian version from Henri Perrot-Minot), and a more nuanced Morey-St.-Denis 1er Cru Vielles Vignes from Hubert Lignier, which has some nice old vines complexity, though it seemed lighter and less interesting than it was 5+ years ago. A Nuits-St.-Georges Aux Meurgers from Meo-Camuzet displayed the virtues and flaws that seem to run through all the Meo 1990’s (including the Cros Parantoux, tasted two weeks earlier), with good depth of fruit and complexity being marred by an inexperienced oak regimen that obtrudes on the finish. Only a poised and nuanced Nuits-St.-Georges Les St. Georges from Gouges broke the spell, with excellent balance, sweet, unbaked fruit, earth and mineral tones, and a long, if slightly hot, finish (92).
For the second session, we began with the Vosne premier crus, and while the problems were more varied in nature, things were not necessarily looking up. A Chaumes from Jean Tardy was heavy and ponderous, with too much rustic tannin (85), while the Clos des Reas from Jean Gros had almost dirty off-notes (several people noted that the same was true of a bottle in the Clos des Reas tasting the prior week). The Hudelot Malconsorts, like all of the Hudelot 1990s, began with a fair amount of barnyard and an almost soupy quality, and then transitioned to something that was sweet and easy, pleasant but no more (88), while the Meo Brulees, which had a lot going for it in terms of black fruit, minerals and balance, again was dominated on the finish by the oak (88). A flight of Clos Vougeots raised the bar only slightly, with the Rion, despite some attractive qualities, typically soupy and with enough finishing oak to make the Meo look restrained (87), a good but not profound Arnoux, which had nice clarity and minerality but a touch of heat and burnt fruit at the end (89), an Anne & Francois Gros Grand Maupertuis that was powerful, with rich cherries and plums, though the oak up front and heat on the finish troubled me (88),
a Faiveley that showed a remarkable lack of fruit given the vintage, dried underbrush notes, and raspy tannins (82), and a Hudelot-Noellat that resembled the Malconsorts in being sweet and easy, slightly more weighty though with less minerality than its premier cru cousin (87). Among the Clos Vougeots, the best for me was the Musigni of Gros Frere et Soeur—with good minerality, a gamy note, medium body, excellent balance and a sweet fruit finish (91). (Clive Coates noted that these vines were still relatively young in 1990.) Two Romanee St. Vivants followed: a Confuron which despite some silkiness had too much toasty oak and not very refined tannins for an RSV (86), and a very good Jadot, with a nose of refined Asian spice, excellent power and presence, and only some slightly rough tannins detracting a bit from the overall positive impression (90).
It was with the next flight, however, that we really began to see the “other” 1990 vintage emerge. Finally we saw wines that reflected the full potential of the vintage, and it was a remarkable potential indeed. The most outstanding of seven Richebourgs was clearly the Jean Gros, with a deep nose of smoke, spice, black fruit and game; on the palate it was both intense and refined, with a very long minerally finish (96). Indeed, if any appellation seems to evoke the spirit of this vintage, it is Richebourg, with its predisposition to power and density allied to finesse. The Gros Frere & Soeur was also quite good, showing that density and power, with refined tannins on the finish (93). The Hudelot-Noellat was again a bit too easy but its appealing sweet fruit and charm were hard to resist totally (90), while the Leroy was still young, and a bit idiosyncratic—more Leroy than Richebourg, one felt—but complex, with notes of cinnamon, gingerbread, and gooseberry (!), and quite powerful (91+). (A bottle from Anne-Francoise Gros, though the same wine as the Jean Gros, was distinctly different in both color and flavor profile (87); bottles from Grivot and Thibault Liger-Belair were clearly off-kilter (NR)).
Building from strength to strength, the next up was La Romanee (Bouchard P&F bottling), which had a distinct aroma of violets, spice and game; though to the nit-picky (moi?) it was a bit burly for La Romanee and carrying a bit too much new oak, it was nevertheless a triumph of vineyard and vintage over indifferent winemaking (92). The La Tache was in another realm; while it remains stubbornly youthful, it is also full of promise, with a nose of intense Asian spice, violets and what Aubert de Villaine calls the “touch of green” that turns eventually to rose petal; on the palate it had wonderful sweet silky fruit, great power and highly refined tannins, and after a half hour in the glass, the glorious “peacock’s tail” finish emerged (96+). We then finished the evening, perhaps a little idiosyncratically, with two Musignys. The first, from Drouhin, while still evolving and carrying a fair amount of tannin, was becoming silky and elegant, a wine of great charm and breed, with a long transparent finish (94). Last came the de Vogue, a controversial wine whose last credible defender, Clive Coates, was there to present the defense. This wine, which Clive said was, out of barrel, the best young Burgundy he had ever tasted (and indeed I felt similarly when I tasted the wine newly arrived in bottle), seemed to me—among many others, most notably Burghound–to be coming apart by the turn of the millennium, with drying fruit and screechy tannins. Yet Clive has maintained that the problem was one of the “American stock” of this wine—that something had happened in the shipping process, and that bottles in France, acquired from the Domaine, showed no such problems. To make his point, Clive provided a bottle from his own stock. While this was in relative terms fresher than any bottle I have had in a long time, it still showed signs of losing its fruit and had a raspy tannic finish, suggesting that this bottle was merely a few years behind in its (negative) development, rather than being different in kind to the “American stock.” Even Clive acknowledged that this bottle had not showed as he hoped, and doubt seemed to be creeping in—at least for the moment.
The third session proved something of an anti-climax, though with five Rousseaus in prospect, it should
have been more than that. In brief, there were a number of wines from both the “good” and “bad” 1990 vintages, as well as a number that simply failed to show well, or reflected poor winemaking. Among the wines that showed well were the Drouhin Chambertin, with lovely meat, smoke, spice, lavender and licorice, impeccable balance and a silky texture (96), Roumier Bonnes Mares, showing more density than most examples I have had of this (93), and a first-rate Griottes-Chambertin from Ponsot, now developing a great silky texture despite still carrying a fair amount of tannin (93+). Also showing well were the Ruchottes-Chambertin from Dr. Georges Mugneret, with characteristic meatiness, excellent weight and power, though not an especially elegant wine, and one that still needs time (91), and both the Mazy-Chambertin (90+) and Clos de la Roche (91) from Rousseau, as well as a Drouhin Bonnes Mares that, while still good, had seemed more compelling earlier in the decade (90). Sadly, especially given the performance of the “lesser” Rousseaus, neither the Chambertin nor the Clos de Beze was in form: both seemed reduced, though I’m not sure why that would be, and though they showed elements of greatness, neither of these bottles was what it should have been (at the Chambertin/Beze retrospective in 2002, both showed quite well, meriting 94 and 93+ scores). Other bottles worth mentioning included the Rousseau Ruchottes, which was a bit on the barnyard side (89), its showing consistent with most prior tastings of this wine; and the Vogue Bonnes Mares, from “American stock” and showing about the same level of negative development as the Musigny (88). The Faiveley Gevrey Cazetiers and Clos de Beze were both disappointing, as was a Bouchard Chambertin, but all seemed to suffer more from indifferent winemaking and sloppy oak treatment than from the vintage, and a Dujac Gevrey Combottes was pleasant but anonymous (87). A Remoissenet Charmes-Chambertin is best passed over in silence.
A few brief words on the whites: we only had 6, not enough to be a representative sample (and of these, one was corked), yet they ran a considerable gamut: a dead bottle of Latour Chevalier-Montrachet Les Demoiselles (no surprise there), an aging but still aggressive and idiosyncratic Lafon Meursault Charmes, a youthful but slight bottle of Leflaive Puligny Pucelles, a delicious bottle of de Vogue Musigny Blanc, beautifully reflecting the unusual terroir of this wine (92), and a really fine bottle of Bienvenues-Batard- Montrachet from Ramonet, showing perhaps more power than usual for this vineyard, a classic Ramonet flavor profile, a good deal of intensity and great persistence (93).
In sum, the best reds have rich, ripe fruit, complexity, density and balance, and at age 20 are now just beginning to develop a silkiness that should become more pronounced as time passes, and they possess the tannin and acid structure to age and develop for a considerable period to come. Though this is not a particularly terroir-driven vintage, the terroir is not invisible, and certain terroirs (Richebourg) seem more in sync with the vintage than others (Volnay). But the vintage clearly had its problems, and as noted above many of the wines are unbalanced, with baked flavors and aromas, drying fruit, and the beginnings of oxidative notes. What happened? Allen Meadows offers the best perspective, noting that the cessation of progress toward full maturity as a result of the summer’s heat, coupled with generally quite high yields, often did not allow for fully ripe phenolics despite producing aromas that were initially suggestive of full ripeness. Also, one needs to remember that in 1990, Burgundy was in transition: for example, as Clive Coates notes in his book, canopy management, which would have been helpful in a vintage such as this, was as yet poorly understood, and there was less pruning to lower yields than is the case today. In addition, while most of the then-top producers were represented in this tasting (a significant exception was Henri Jayer, whose Cros Parantoux, tasted two weeks earlier, was stunningly pure and elegant (96) ), among those producers, several–including Meo, Hudelot-Noellat, Arnoux and Grivot (and to an extent Georges Mugneret), as well as Faiveley and Bouchard among the negociants–were not producing wines of nearly the caliber that they are today. Thus, between the problems the vintage turned out to present,
and the smaller number of producers at the top of their game, it is not so easy to find wines that express the full potential of this vintage, and there is probably less great wine than one would see were there to be a comparable vintage today. Nevertheless, the best of them are truly superb, and it is certainly reasonable to believe that they will continue to develop well.
© 2010 Douglas E. Barzelay