Vintages

There are two schools of thought regarding wine collecting and vintages:-

• Buy the best wines from the lesser vintages and the lesser wines from the better vintages.
• Buy the best wines you can afford from the best vintages

The first offering of perceived wisdom is an adequate piece of advice aimed at the collector looking purely to drink, a more encompassing scrap of advice may be:-

• Buy the best wines you can afford from the best vintages, if the year is not up to scratch look at the best wines from a region that is having the perfect growing conditions, and buy back vintages that are underperforming.

Is it true there is a lot of hype surrounding each vintage release?

It is wise to understand the marketing, especially in Bordeaux. Every year it is either rated as the vintage of the millennium, the century, the decade, or a classic year with approachable wines. The frequency with which these vintages come around has very little bearing on the expected frequency. i.e. don’t expect a vintage of the century once every one hundred years or so, it will probably only happen a couple of times every decade.

A simple table shows each vintage by category of hype, whilst there may be some argument as to which each vintage will fall into which category. I think that there is little argument into the frequency that these vintages arrive.