IN VINO VERITAS

Collecting fine wine can be a rewarding pastime in more ways than one

- Duncan Quinn

I fell in love with wine from afar. Watching one of the coolest guys I ever met entertaining on the terrace of his old rectory up in the hills behind Nice in the South of France—technically the Côte d’Azur in Provence. Of course, it was preceded by the clanking of freezing-cold ice cubes into long glasses, soon filled with syrupy green Pernod Ricard Pastis 51, which smelled of licorice and added gasoline to the conversational fire. Aperitifs over, the cicadas raised their calf-rubbing to a crescendo, the air resonated with pine sap, and the wine began to flow with the first course of dinner.

Sometimes a petit vin de table, sometimes a classified Bordeaux, or fine Burgundy. Of course, at the time I knew nothing. In fact, less than nothing, as I had never so much as sipped a spiked punch. Let alone dreamt of lunches at Balthazar in New York City, fueled by some of the finest wines known to man, many of them classified Bordeaux. For many, it is seen as the wine of choice for investors. A 1982 Château Margaux for instance, or a 1983 from its next-door neighbor at Château Palmer. Both of these wines are on the list that is one of the foundations of basic wine knowledge. And both are banner years. Epic years. Wines that dreams are made of.

It was in 1855 that the French classified the wines of Bordeaux into a premier league table of sorts. Napoleon III wanted to showcase the very best French wines to be presented at the Exposition Universelle de Paris. So the 60 or so top properties for red Bordeaux wine were ranked by the leading brokers of the day. Price was used as a proxy for quality, and rankings ranged from Premier Cru (First Growth) to Cinquième Cru (Fifth Growth.) The rankings have remained mostly the same ever since, with the notable exception of Château Mouton Rothschild which was added in 1973.