Buying And Cellaring Wine
by David Shaw

I knew so little about wine when I first started going to serious restaurants in the mid-1970s, that I routinely ordered white wine — cheap white wine — with everything, even elegant lamb dishes made with red wine sauces. But a few considerate and conscientious waiters gently nudged me toward a realization that certain kinds of wine go well with some dishes and not with others, and before long, I was taking a wine appreciation class, attending wine-tastings, and buying and cellaring wine.

Because my interest in wine grew out of my love of food — which grew, at least in part, out of a burgeoning love affair with France — I began by buying French wines, specifically the red wines of Bordeaux. In Bordeaux, every vineyard has its own individual name — in contrast with Burgundy, the other great wine-growing region of France, where learning the myriad wines of just one small area is like trying to recall, in order, all the leaders of post-war Italy.

While the single Bordeaux vineyard of Larose-Trintadon sprawls across 424 acres, for example, there are 82 different Burgundy winemakers squeezed chic-by-trowel on the 165 acres known as Clos de Vougeot. Some of them — Leroy, Méo-Camuzet, Georges Roumier, Gros Frère et Soeur, and René Engel to name but a few — produce truly superb wines. But several dozen others make wines that range from good to mediocre at best, and you practically need a degree in oenology to know which is which. That makes Burgundy a riskier buy than Bordeaux, even for the experienced wine drinker. Because the Pinot Noir grape that yields most red Burgundies is relatively fragile when compared to the hardy Cabernet Sauvignon grape that’s largely responsible for most Bordeaux, Burgundy is an even riskier proposition to transport and age. Moreover, because individual vineyards and total Burgundy production are much smaller than those in Bordeaux, the wines of Burgundy are in shorter supply and are generally more expensive than those of Bordeaux.

So, being neither a Medici nor a masochist, I started my wine collection with Bordeaux — the then-current vintage, 1979, a good but not great year. Because I live in California, I also bought some Cabernet, which was generally cheaper and even more plentiful than Bordeaux. In the last two or three years, though, I have found my taste shifting. Most Cabernet-based wines seem too similar, too one-dimensional, too heavy for the kind of food I eat in warm-weather Southern California. I have come to find most California Cabernets, in particular, too alcoholic, too overpowering to properly complement most food. Thus, the aforementioned risks notwithstanding, I have increasingly enjoyed the lighter yet richer, fruitier taste of Burgundy — or, to be precise, of the Pinot Noir grape, which also includes the rapidly improving Pinots of California and Oregon.

Pinot-based wines generally have the added advantage of being drinkable at a much younger age than most good Cabernet-based wines, although they also age well. (I’m still drinking some 1985 Burgundies.)

But taste in wine, as in anything else, is purely individual — and often idiosyncratic — and I offer this lengthy introduction-cum-digression on individual taste as a sort of caveat to what follows. Although many wine writers are eager to tell you what to buy to stock the “ideal’’ cellar — such-and-such a percentage of reds, such-and-such a percentage of whites, so many slow-maturing wines and so many ready-to-drink wines, this much money allotted for high-end wines, this much for medium- and low-priced wines — no one can do that for you. You have to taste wines and decide what you like and how often you drink and what you can afford to spend, and based on all of that, what to buy.

If you are older or in a hurry and have both a little time and more than a little money, you can develop a cellar full of aged wine fairly quickly by bidding in any of the two dozen or so wine auctions now held every year in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Wine prices in general and auction prices in particular have gone sky-high the last few years, but for people of means, the auction market is still the best way to acquire a collection quickly. As was the case when I started buying wine, Bordeaux is still the easiest (if now considerably more expensive) fine wine to buy at auction. If you choose this route, you should concentrate on Bordeaux from 1982, ’85, ’86, ’89, and ’90. Excellent big-ticket items include Pétrus, Latour, Mouton-Rothschild, Lafite-Rothschild, Margaux, Haut Brion, Cheval Blanc, Le Pin, Pichon Lalande, and Clinet, none of which you are likely to find for under $100 a bottle and most of which will cost much more. The ’82 Mouton now sells for $300 or $400, the ’82 Château Pétrus for two or three times as much.

The ’82 Bordeaux vintage has achieved mythic status, but these are all very good-to-superb vintages, and you can probably find many lesser but still eminently drinkable wines at affordable prices. At one auction, I noticed an assortment of ’86 Bordeaux — Gruaud-Larose, Montrose, Meyney, and Hortevie — selling for $50 a bottle — and a case of ’90 Les Ormes de Pez for $26 a bottle.

There are so many different Bordeaux that your best bet is to check one of the major wine guides — Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, Stephen Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar, or Wine Spectator — and compare their ratings with your own preferences and proceed accordingly. This is even more true for other wines. Thanks to modern technology, there have been many great wines and many fine vintages over the past 15 years — so many good wines in the, say, $40 to $60 a bottle range that it’s virtually impossible to recommend specific wines without creating a shopping list that’s longer than a limo (although it is still relatively easy to tout the exceptional wines at the high end of the price spectrum, in old and new wines alike. These would include the Bordeaux mentioned above; the red Burgundies from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Leroy and Dujac, white Burgundies from Vincent Leflaive, Verget, Coche-Dury, and Comtes Lafon; Barolos from Sandrone, Conterno and Altare, super Tuscans like Sassicaia, Ornellaia, and Solaia, and California Cabernets from Opus, Dominus, Diamond Creek, the Bryant Family Vineyard, Colgin-Schrader, and Screaming Eagle).

In general, if you buy older wines, at auction or elsewhere, these are the vintages to look for in French wines outside Bordeaux:
— Red Burgundy: 1985 and ’90.
— White Burgundy: 1986, ’89, and ’92.
— Alsace (these wines go especially well with spicy Asian foods): 1986, ’90, ’94, and ’95.
— Rhone: 1983, ’85, and ’90.
— Sauternes (dessert wines): 1983, ’86, ’88, ’89, and ’90.

And elsewhere:
— Barolo (Italy’s “king of wines, wine of kings’’ — and, along with red Burgundy, one of my two favorites): 1985, ’89, and ’90.
— Tuscan wines: 1990.
— Spain: 1994.
— Australia: 1986, ’89, 90, ’93, and ’96.
— Germany: 1989, ’90, ’94, and ’95.
— Vintage Port: 1977, ’83, and 1985.
— California Cabernets: 1984, ’85, ’86, ’87, and ’94.

For most people, alas, auctions are — at least for now — problematic at best. Buying wines retail, on their original release (or buying them before release, as “futures’’) is the only sensible way to build a wine cellar. That takes patience, though. But if you start buying now, you can take advantage of several good, recent, still widely available vintages, in particular:
— Red and white Burgundies from 1995, ’96, and ’97.
— Bordeaux from 1995 and ’96.
— Loire Valley whites from 1996.
— California Cabernets from 1995, ’96, and ’97.
— California Chardonnays and Oregon and California Pinot Noirs from whatever recent vintage you can find.
— Alsatian and Australian wines from 1996.

I have been particularly impressed with the ’95 and ’96 red Burgundies and have bought for cellaring a number of these wines from Denis Bachelet, Denis Mortet, Robert Groffier, Fréderic Esmonin, Marius Delarche, Dominique Laurent, and Philippe Livera, virtually all of them priced at $35 to $45 a bottle. I would also recommend buying virtually any ’95 Chianti you can find in the $14 to $18 range, especially those from Querciabella, Castello dei Rampolla, Fonterutoli, Felsina, and Fontodi.

Among the early-drinking (and moderately priced) wines I’d suggest are the most recent vintages you can find of Beaujolais from Sylvain Fessy, Jean Calot, Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thévenet, and the ubiquitous Georges Duboeuf. Rhone reds from J. Vidal-Fleury and Château de Segries and Alsatian whites from Lucien Albrecht and Jean-Baptiste Adam are also quite affordable, and the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France has also begun producing very good and very reasonably priced wines the last few years; look for those from Lascaux, Campuget, L’Arjolle, l’Hortus, and Gilbert Alquier et Fils, among many others. In Italy — my favorite source for inexpensive wines — the wines of Taurino, Antinori, Argiolas, Regaleali, and Le Pupille are all worth seeking out. I have generally been less satisfied with cheaper wines from California. The whites tend to be either too thin or vaguely sweetish, and the reds too heavy (although I do like the Sauvignon Blanc from Babcock’s Eleven Oaks Vineyard and the Pinot Noirs from Olivet Lane and Kent Rasmussen).

Actually, there are a few California wines that are among my favorite wines made anywhere, but they’re produced in relatively small quantities, and unless you have connections, you’ll have to call the vineyard, get on a waiting list and then, in a few years, buy whatever they deign to allot you. That’s what I’ve done, and I now think I have Christmas three times a year — once, with everyone else on December 25, once whenever Marcassin Vineyard Napa Valley sends my Chardonnay (one of the great white wines of the world), and again when Williams Selyem sends my Pinot Noir (my favorite American red wine).