OVERRATED, UNDERRATED – HOW AND WHY?

A friend arrived for dinner bearing two wines he wanted me to taste blind. He said he was curious to know what I’d think of them, which told me these were not just random wines, but that they were noteworthy in some way.

One was white, the other red.

The white wine first struck me as an ambitious Aligoté. It was coarse and disjointed; if it were a car it would have had rattles and dings. I couldn’t guess where it was from. It had no particular signature. I drank it again the following day – my friend left the bottles with me – and made sure to have it at cellar temp, which is 62º no

w (in June), because I wanted to see if anything like creaminess or even a pleasurable texture would emerge. By then I’d been told it was a Chardonnay, where it was from, and who produced it. I wanted to approve of it, but I found the wine merely “decent.”

The red wine was good. “Good.” It had gloss and polish, a bit too prominent woodiness. It felt like a constructed wine, not quite coherent pieces of this-and-that, missing the mortar that hold such wines together. (We also call that “middle” or umami.) But with those caveats, the wine was plausible; I had an image of some celebrity’s side hustle. I guessed (correctly) it was Pinot Noir, drank it again the next day, and felt the same. Good wine, and no better than “good wine.”

Considering the wines were in some way significant, I offered my appraisal of what would be appropriate retail prices for each of them. The white shouldn’t cost more than $14.99 and the red no more than $19.99, based on what I judged to be their inherent qualities. But by then I’d sniffed out the agenda behind his bringing them, and I wasn’t surprised – distressed, but not surprised – to learn they were trendy, “sought-after,” maybe even allocated, definitely on the lists of all the cool-kid somms, and when I asked how this could possibly be, I learned that a prominent reviewer had “awarded” the wines “93 points” each, and that they retailed for $90 to $100 respectively.

A lot of things go into the price of a wine. Some of it depends on any debt the producer has to service, some of it could be the time needed to amortize startup costs, some of it is supply and demand, some of it is smoke and mirrors, some of it is the producer wishing to make a “statement” with his pricing, and at the end of all this, a teensy bit might conceivably have to do with the wine’s actual, um, quality.

I won’t say whose wines these are. No need to. The people are probably nice and sincere and doing their best. I will say that a phenomenon such as this – wildly overrated and overpriced “items-containing-wine” are some of the reason people are pissed off at wine.

A few days later I opened a 2023 Spätburgunder from Baum-Barth in Ingelheim, which is in the Rheinhessen, which is in Germany, which automatically denotes a wine that costs less than it’s worth. At roughly half the price (if even that) of the luckless wines my pal brought over, this wine was utterly superb, addictively delicious; it was acutely painful to reach the bottom of the bottle.

I’ll report on the wine when I’ve tasted the two others I received. But come on! This tiny estate is only in its sixth vintage, they are true garagistes at this point, they too have startup costs, but their wines have been consistently lovely and sometimes gorgeous in the several vintages I’ve tasted. They are correctly priced for the pleasure and competence they deliver. And being German, they have no commodity value to trade on.

And it is precisely this – commodity value – that is why some wines (too many) are overpriced and others (also too many) are underpriced. In effect the proper price for a commodity is whatever some credulous clown is ready to pay. For him the “value” of a thing is fungible and arbitrary. You could argue that anything involving money (itself abstract) and the relation of demand to supply is bound to be arbitrary, and I won’t disagree, except to say those furies have been loosed upon the world and we are worse off because of it.

In my merchant days I’d answer the question “How does it feel to have perennially unpopular taste?” by saying Just lucky I guess. In my decades in the business I nearly always could offer a wine for what I judged it to be worth. Often for much less than I judged it to be worth (Merkelbach, anyone?), and I was grateful to live in a world that contained such a reassuring quotient of reality. I believe you would find it a useful antidote to the madness that prevails in other precincts of the wine world. And overpaying for ordinary wine leaves you a smaller budget to spend on wine that is actually rewarding.

And if the sky fell we would all catch larks….