Myth Over Matter: Mature Burgundy 1920-2019 

BY NEAL MARTIN | MARCH 30, 2023

Let’s clear the elephant from the room…

Many wines herein are extraordinarily rare, more myth than matter. Some are so expensive that they could bankrupt a small equatorial country or solve the financial predicament of a Swiss bank. As I typed up the notes, I often found myself reminiscing about blackened saturated corks being surgically prized from ancient bottles encrusted by dust and time, nobody knowing what their contents would reveal, yet light-headed with anticipation and the thought that this would be their solitary encounter. By all means, grab a calculator and punch in their cumulative market value. That would be missing the point. Each and every bottle fulfilled its raison d’être: opened and poured, shared and savored. Not one ignominiously gathered dust, reduced to simply a vessel for accumulating resale value for an indifferent owner. Thankfully, not everyone is like that. Casually martyring a bottle of 2007 Romanée-Conti Grand Cru to gleeful disbelieving guests in Beaune, a friend was asked why he was pouring such a valuable bottle?

His rhetorical answer was straight and apposite…

“What else am I going to do with it?”

The idea that professional wine critics spend all their time in hermetically-sealed laboratories dissecting wines and never entertaining the thought of consuming wine for sheer pleasure is utter nonsense. It’s far from the truth. Every full-time wine writer enjoys wine outside work hours, their vocation an extension of their passion. Many bottles in this report are ones that illuminated private dinners accompanied by friends and like-minded oenophiles: wines of various maturity, some expensive and others…well…I am not going to write “cheap” because that word is no longer applicable, but let’s say, less expensive. No, not everyone is going to unleash three Clos Vougeots from Engel or a double magnum of 1953 Corton. But here’s the thing…sometimes they do. And sometimes Bacchus and Lady Luck smile upon you because you’re there when it happens.

I sympathize with what some might perceive as the immorality of drinking 750mls of fermented grape juice that might have funded your child through university. I bet there’s some kid stacking supermarket shelves bitterly ruing that his parents literally drank away their higher education. Though market values can enter realms of obscene, there are oenophiles whose passion for Burgundy predates its fetishization, including myself. Passions remain unchanged even if prices become unhinged. Some are coerced to sell, and who can begrudge that? We live in straitened times. Yet many view the price of a bottle as what they once paid, not what they could sell it for now. What you lose pulling that cork depends upon your interpretation of opportunity cost.