Scene: Natural wine bar, brick walls. wax capsules. etc After a long discussion about wine from Jura.
Me: “It’s great, it reminds me of Michel Lafarge”
Him: “Who?”
Me: “Michel Lafarge, you know, top producer of Volnay?”
Him: “Never heard of ‘im”
I can’t remember who it was, I think it might have been Gianfranco Soldera, reminiscing a few months back about his vinous education. He was remembering the great wines that became the key reference points for his memory bank of what wine was capable of aspiring to. Mouton 1949, Armand Rousseau 1985, etc, etc. He wanted to make wines as good as these. I think he probably succeeded.
Gianfranco bemoaned the current generation of drinkers and winemakers who haven’t had the chance to taste the classics because they’re just too expensive. Indeed, a few years ago, I was at a tasting of 1982 Bordeaux chatting to an MW, who’d never tasted a wine from this epoch-changing vintage.
Understand prices, and you can understand a lot of what’s happening in the world. Was the surge of great restaurants in London about a new discovery of interest in food, or was it driven as much by high prices of rental property pushing people to eat out because they didn’t have a dining table at home?
Overnoy, L’Anglore, Foillard etc. If you have the connections and can find them, you can drink the best natural wines in the world without spending a fortune. The popularity of these ‘new classics’ is in part a natural reaction to the increasing unattainability of the ‘old-classics’.
But, because of this, it seems there’s a generation of young wine lovers, who don’t aspire to drink the classics anymore. I think that’s a shame. When I started, it was all I wanted to do, to encounter Lafite, Petrus et al. To bag some of the ‘big-game’ of the wine world. I don’t feel like that so much anymore, but it was an important period of my life that allowed me a sense of scale as to what wine, and older wine in particular was all about.
And, it’s not like all of the classic wines of France are out of reach. Their is a plethora of well-priced, delicious Bordeaux out there that deserves more exposure on the capitals trendy new lists. The importers Vine-Trail deserve a lot of credit for pushing these wines at the moment.
So, in the rush to celebrate the new, the trendy, let’s not forget the classics. To comprehend the new it helps to understand the past.