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Big Bucks

Written By: Brian Freedman on Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Great Wine Doesn't Have to Break the Bank

The amount of money wine lovers are willing to spend on a bottle seems, these days, to be creeping inexorably northward. Whatever has caused this—wine’s increasing popularity in this country, the incessant drumbeat of glowing reviews and articles about the next have-to-buy-it vintage—fewer people than ever before bat their eyes at bottle prices in the $50, $100, and more range.

This phenomenon can be considered a great thing: It means that more and more people are appreciating the nuances of finely crafted, often brilliantly produced wines, and are willing to shell out big bucks in order to get the pleasure that results from drinking them.

But it can also be looked at as a truly terrible one. Wine, after all, is not an ordinary commodity. And chief among the many ways it differs from so much else we eat and drink on a regular basis is the luxury status it has achieved. Sure, foie gras, truffles, caviar, and the like are expensive, but most people don’t consume them with any sort of regularity. So spending the big bucks on them, on occasion, is not quite as nonsensical as what’s going on with wine these days.

And while it’s not my place to judge how people choose to spend their hard-earned living, it is appropriate to point out the fallacy of the underlying philosophy of such expenditures.

Because wine does not have to be a rare commodity. In fact, many of the most expensive, coveted bottlings are not produced in any sort of limited quantity. Most people would be shocked, I believe, to learn of the amount of wine produced by Bordeaux’s first growths of the Medoc every year. Chateau Latour, for example, produces more than 18,000 cases, Chateau Lafite Rothschild between 15,000 and 25,000 cases, and Chateau Margaux approximately 12,500 cases.

These numbers are far great than most people would imagine, for the prices and the perceived exclusivity of these wines understandably give many people the impression that they must be in limited supply. And, indeed, while these kinds of production runs are dwarfed by the mega-producers of Australia and California (Yellow Tail, for example, sent more than 8,000,000 cases of wine to the United States in 2005), they are still not the boutique-y brands that they are often perceived to be.

There are any number of reasons for their stratospheric prices—demand, history, prestige, the collector and auction market, the en primeur system and the effect that the annual Pamplona-style bull run to acquire them results in—and vinophiles will continue to argue about them, just as they always have. What’s important is to realize that these incredibly high-priced wines are far from the only great ones out there.

In fact, if you do your research and know what to look for, there are some truly remarkable finds out there in today’s wine marketplace. Because we are, believe it or not, living in the golden age of affordable wine.

From unfamiliar parts of Spain to underappreciated regions of South America and traversing the entire world of wine in between, there are more great, small-production, idiosyncratic bottlings available to American wine lovers than there ever have been before. And because producers from these regions often don’t want to compete with their more famous counterparts, or cannot afford to in terms of advertising and marketing, their wines tend to fly under the radar.

Wander your local wine shop—or, even better, the pages of ClassicWines.com—and check out the deals on the reds from France’s Languedoc-Roussillon or Portugal’s less-heralded regions like Alentejo and Estremadura. Look for wines from Uruguay and from Lebanon. Head east, toward Austria and Germany, and pop open a few bottles of gruner-veltliner, of zweigelt, of blaufrankisch.

These wines are exactly the sort that true wine lovers should be seeking out. For while acquiring a few trophies is never a bad idea if you can afford them, the real excitement, I tend to believe, comes from the places you’d expect it least. One of the best parts about these wines is that you don’t have to spend a fortune to buy them. And that always makes the juice in the bottle taste better.

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Tagged Under: Bordeaux, Chile, Germany

Posted In: Wine Trends

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phantomoftheoffice
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Posted on 2/15/08

Didn't I see you on Good Day Philadelphia?

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