Are generalised vintage charts any use?

My answer: A little, for coarse guidance.

Certain dramatic vintages produce wines very atypical (in my experience: Burgundy in 1977, Bordeaux in 1980 -- in the latter case, "First Growths," the top names, sold in the US for $10, four or five times cheaper than in adjacent good vintages, and you didn't want to drink them at any price). Certain vintages produced inconsistent years where the products varied greatly within the vintage and region (rains in parts of Europe some years giving rot for the later harvesters; California in the big drought years

1976 and 1977). Traditional vintage charts (I haven't checked the specific ones cited here) reveal the effects of such situations.

(It was popular in the US through the 1970s for "wine geeks" to carry business-card-sized vintage charts. Also, in those days if you said you were a hobbyist of wine, you might hear "Oh? Bordeaux or Burgundy?" as those were the wines most US wine hobbyists knew about. You did not hear of California cult-wine mailing lists or 100-point ratings then. Those innovations, alas, came later.)

Thompson and Johnson (longtime collaborating California and British wine writers) produced a more detailed, ambitious pocket booklet on wines for some years, I don't know what became of it after the early 1980s. May have been killed off by those innovations I cited. (Alas.)

I'm more interested in their value in terms of whether to keep or drink, i.e. whether to keep cellaring. The quality of vintages is less important to me. TBH when I see a vintage chart I see the rating as filler information, data they put in because they can. The value is in the cellaring notes to me. Perhaps I'm wrong in taking that one dimensional analysis of these charts?

Dan

If I can add my own 2 Eurocents... if you stick to good producers, you will rarely have bad wines, even in lesser vintages you will get wines that are different, maybe more suitable for early drinking. Some so-called bad years can turn out to be very good, I remember a 54 Chateauneuf du Pape, supposedly a mediocre year, had been disappointing for decades, but in 2001 it came back and was just great.

Appellations that require an obligatory minimum number of years in wood will suffer more than others in bad years, the lighter wines of lesser years are ruined by excessively long aging, it would be better to demote these wines to a lesser appellation and appreciate them for their youthful freshness, they can be wonderful. That IMHO is why Brunello is so disappointing in lesser years, not because the wine itself was no good, but because the market temptation to sell it as Brunello is too much and the growers insist on aging it for the required time, thus delivering overpriced no good Brunnello instead of making a delicious Rosso di Montalcino.

In most cases, barring a natural disaster, no matter how bad the year is, if the winemaker has the courage and the honesty to select grapes and put in the extra effort, he will obtain a very good wine. In smaller quantities of course. Of course, many resort to other means : in an off Bordeaux year, you can see entire columns of tanker trucks from Puglia heading West...

Mike

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

Quite. I have asked your question before, and got the same answers as you (about vintage quality rather than drinking window). I never did get a satisfactory answer to my question, but as one relative newbie to another, here are some observations:

Wine of different quality levels are designed to reach maturity at different times. With Bordeaux, these times vary from a year or so to a few decades. So no one chart can say when, e.g., all AC Margaux wine is ready to drink.

No chart I have ever seen has said what quality level their recommendations are aimed at, so to my mind they are practically useless. Presumably they represent some sort of average, but how they do the averaging is anyone's guess. By volume of wine produced? I guess not, because that would then reflect the aging potential of pretty poor wine that is not designed to age. Perhaps a decent Cru Bourgeois for Bordeaux? Who knows? Here I am tempted to go into rant mode, but I'll desist.

Even if one knew the quality level they were aimed at, there is still of course a lot of statistical variation, and personal preference is important too.

I also don't believe I have seen "dumb period" ever marked up in vintage charts. For decent Burgundy, I would have thought this is more important than a "drinking window".

The best solution I have found so far is to get a copy of Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book, which contains drinking advice for specific wines. I am in the process of calibrating my tastes against the recommendations given there. At some point I intend to try to use the pocket book to work out what the "vintage charts" are talking about, but ATM I have no idea.

Hope this is of some help. And if anyone else can help you and me, I'f be very grateful to hear from you.

I use vintage charts where I can't get any information on the specific wine. At auctions, I'm rather happier taking a (cheap) gamble on a wine which is from a good and long-living vintage.

Kieran

Personally, I believe that the vintage charts in question are a good reference point to knowing whether or not a specific region was consider bad, okay, good or great. The emphasis is on the region, not on a specific wine. Within any given year, there will always be outstanding wines produced in a region regardless of the overall rating given to the region, just as there will always be bad ones.

Why is this important to me? If I know that the region was considered to have been a good (or better) then I am more apt to branch out and try new producers than if the region was consider to have had a bad vintage. Then I will stick to producers I am familiar with, and with which I am reasonably sure to get a good bottle from.

Hope this is helpful, Gary