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Echinosum -> RE: Need input from Les Carmes Haut Brion (9/27/2023 7:50:26 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Geerath
In 2022 it was probably one of, if not the, buy of the vintage
The merchant Cru World Wine has a little statistical tool where they plot average critic score against latest traded price for a specific wine, across vintages, and then distinguish between over- and under-valued vintages of that wine according to whether they lie above or below the line of best fit. According to that dubious analysis, the 2022 is the most overvalued of all Carmes' vintages. I would like also to see that compared with a line drawn from a much wider sample of clarets. Another, potentially serious problem, is it assumes a linear relation between price and Parker points, which is not the reality. A couple of years ago, or something like that, I referred to some work which appeared to show that price per Parker point goes up quite sharply above about 94. So you adjusted for that, maybe the 2022 is in fact bargain, as you suggest. If we say it is a 98-pt wine, then the current market price of £133/bt looks cheap for that, as you say.
Though what that plot does show is that the 2020 and the 2022 have very similar critic ratings, and the 2020 is still cheaper. In fact, when I was buying some (rather more modest) 2022s earlier this year, I ended up buying some 2020 too, because you can often still get it cheaper. Though in general I read the 2020 vintage is the most classic, long-lived vintage of the recent run, and so I suspect it might need longer to show its worth. Tasting notes on Carmes seem to bear that out.
A lot of top wines are made these days so you can drink them relatively early, and enjoy them. When you look at the "drink from" dates of various critics, they mostly say 2030. But I reckon to drink even my most basic claret at 8+ years, even though multiple sources would suggest drink from 3 or 4. So will a top wine really exhibit its quality when drunk at that age? Or could you get the same enjoyment factor from something a lot cheaper, to drink at that age?
There is a common piece of advice on this forum that in general the very best wines, of claret/rhone/burgundy type, do not tend to exhibit why they are so much better than the next level down until after a long time in bottle, generally 25 years. And I once pointed to a study, showing graphs of drinking enjoyability by age for a selection of top wines sourced from tasting note databases, that tended to bear this strongly out. It also tended to show a dip in enjoyability in the mid-teens of these very top wines, that dreaded dumb phase.
So your question amounts to, if people are now rating Carmes among the very top clarets, averaging 98 pts from critics in 2020 and 2022, has it somehow managed to evade this general principle, that you can't really recognise a 98pt red wine as such until it is 25 yrs old?
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