Of course, as one old wine tasting friend has put it now in bewilderment, no one really needs premium red Burgundies. They are a luxury item and especially expensive in this particular year. ("A luxury in our time? said A. de Villaine to Robert Finigan in 1980, "as they were in 1750, when a bottle of La Tâche cost as much as a postman's weekly salary?") I do not speak today of the Tâche. But some luxurious (concentrated velvety mineraled truffly) red Burgundy now and then can be joyful, and unique, I don't deny it. I am habituated to buying a few bottles of senior Groffier reds in any year that is half decent, and have done so for years, even when others would not. Normally there is time to think.
A few days ago the Groffiers came and went via two usual, _excellent_ channels. One sold out in hours, the other minutes. That same friend, whom some of you know, or anyway have read the work of, characterized the sequence of emails as "breathtaking." (My language was less refined.) And said that journalists have been praising the vintage since October 2002. (I'm not a "minuteman," poised to buy Groffiers at a minute's warning. That would have been necessary.)
-- Post-script: Y'all hotshot linguists might advise (by private email if you prefer -- email for queries of specialized interest is a deep tradition of Netiquette) whence the seeming confluence between the French "tâche," Engl. task, or job, with implicit vestigial S from the circumflex as in hôpital and bâtard; and the German Tasche, Engl. pocket, as in the expression "geben Sie dem Taschentieb keine Chance" (seen at Munich,1972). Serious query; I thought there might be a story somewhere, Google didn't show one, and there was a call here for "angles."
Cheers -- Max