have you got any tips for me on investing and collecting
Burgundy's? Burgundy, like we've said, it's a
complex region and it's a bit of a minefield.
You've got to get the right vintages. You've really got to be great vineyard sites.
if you want to lay something down for a long-time
it probably needs to be atleast Premier or Grand Cru
and then thirdly, good producers. There's some people in Burgundy
that have great land,
they know they're going to sell it at Grand Cru price, they don't
really have to do very much work to make six barrels of wine a year
but then there's the serious producers who will
make sure that their Grand Cru Burgundy is the most amazing wine
and it will last forever. And they're the wines that are going to increase in value
Great vineyard, great producer, great vintage
and they're the kind of wines that you're going to buy and you're going to buy a lot for them
but you sit on them for a long time
definitely make sure that they are stored well and don't make sure that they are in a cellar
where the temperature goes up and down, make sure its not warm
Your corks will dry out, make sure it's humid
so all of those sorts of things so if you're going to buy a really top end wine put it in a cellar
and leave it for 20 years you'll see some investment come back to it.
And what about counterfeit ones I've heard a little bit about that, but can you tell me a bit?
Yeah. Counterfeit wines has been a thing
which has been increasing
over the last few years. There's been quite a famous case recently
a guy called Rudy Kurniawan
who was over in the states who was making
industrial volumes of fake wine
the fake wine market is very lucrative to the guy that's doing it
because he could take this bottle of wine,
he could change the vintage, he can kind of slightly sandpaper
the label, he could kind of put a bit of mould on it a bit of dirt on it
something like that and then rather than selling it as a as a
2014, he could sell it as you know a 1995 or
something like that. The Counterfeit market generally tends to happen with the
red wines. It's a clever market for the counterfeiter
because he will sell it to collectors who
really desperately want that bottle, you know they want that bottle of
1929 Romanee-Conti
and if they find out that someone out there that has the bottle,
you know they'll be quite blinkered so they'll just think wow I've got the bottle,
They'll buy the bottle, they probably won't pay too much attention to it
and then they open it for all their friends, obviously their friends
are thrilled, because they think the tasting in 1929 Romanee-Conti
and then at the end of the day
you drink the evidence that there's nothing else remaining.
So it's become a really
lucrative business that the forgery market.
And you just got to be very vigilant about it.
I guess it's like things like art, you know, a first edition
books, pieces of artwork you know
or a Picasso or something like that. You know its all about
finding out where it came from. What's made it so lucrative
wine forgers is the fact that it's drunk,
so it's gone after that, it just becomes a memory.
Picasso is going to be hanging on the wall for
50 years and some wine experts is going to come and say that's not right.
The wine you get one chance to decide whether it's right or not.
And what about buying wine at auction? Buying wine in auction is a
you can get some real bargains. You really know what you need to do.
You kind of need to be used to that auction market especially if you're going for the
big bottles. You don't want to accidentally scratch your nose
and spend half a million pounds by mistake
But yeah, if you know what you're doing.
And again it's good provenance. It's good. It's you know an established
auction house with a good reputation
then yeah you can get bargains and often
if you're looking for private sellers you know people that have
either passed away and then selling the celler
through someone like Christie's or Sotheby's or someone like that
that's often the only way that you're going to get hold of that really old
kind of iconic wine is through auction houses.
So you mentioned cellars then, can you give me some tips on how to start
my own cellar? You want to kind of
think about what you want to put in there.
So you want to want to mix it with
some Grand Cru some Premier Cru some Village
and then probably everyday drinking wine is going to be a straight Bourgogne.
So you want different levels of wine for different occasions.
You want mixture of red, a mixture of white and mixture of
Cote De Nuit, Cote de Beaune a mixture
Macon, that kind of diversity is good.
As regarding storage,
you want to be in a place which is dark.
You don't want to you want to be a place which is relatively humid,
you can kind of do that by getting a bucket full of sand and
just make sure you're constantly keeping that sand wet in an enclosed room
will keep it relatively humid. You don't want to be in a
vibration, so you don't want movement
and then you really don't want and probably the most important thing is
fluctuations of temperature.
So, if you're thinking about putting it in your garage or somewhere like that
in wintertime it's going to be right down.
it's gonna be down sub-zero sometimes so that wine is gonna get very cold
and then you know if you garage has sunlight directly on
the walls in summertime, a garage like that might get up quite high
and really
wine inside a bottle is a liquid and what happens is that liquid
as it gets hot, it expands. As it gets cold, it contracts
and you've got your cork in the end, what you do end up with
if you're a big temperature fluctuations, you have something called thermal
pistoning, and basically what happens is
when it gets hot pushes the cork out maybe a millimetre or so
when it gets very cold it sucks the cork back in,
maybe a millimetre again or so
with that thermal pistoning, that movement of the cork,
what it really does it breaks the seal around the outside of the cork
and it allows oxygen to get in, and if it allows oxygen to get in,
your wine is to oxidise oxidise and become
prematurely aged. and that's one thing that we do
when we're buying wine as well. You would always look around the capsule,
if you're buying a very old wine. If you saw signs of leakage
in a wine dribbling out underneath the capsule or
a wine that run across the label, they're all kind
of no-no's or
warning signs. So, yes, a celler needs to be humid.
It needs to be at the even temperature
relatively cool temperature and it wants to be
out the lights and out of vibration. So if you want to put
a little rack underneath your stairs
but not for leaving it for 20 years or so.
You know in winter you're going to put your central heating on and you boiler is going to spark up
and you're going to end up with boiled wines.
it depends on the size of the cellar really.
And what about the size of the bottles does that make any big difference?
Basically the smaller the bottle
the more quickly it will age and the bigger the bottle more slowly
it will age. So if you've got half bottles they're
going to age probably twice as quickly as maybe
a third as quickly as bottles. And then if you're going up to magnums
and then methuselah's and jeroboam's and the really big imperials
those big format, they're going to age very, very slowly
it's really the ratio of liquid
compared to how much liquid is touching the cork
So big formats age over over a long period
of time. But then again you wouldn't want to buy a you know an
imperial of Grand Cru Burgundy and drink it,
you probably wouldn't start drinking that for 30 years.
So you've got to think about if I'm buying
how much time have I got left.
They're great investments, and they're great things you know,
if you're kids born and you want to give him something great for his 21st birthday.
Big format bottle. You know it is a great is a great present
So do the critic scores have much effect on the prices
of the wines this days? Probably the effect of the critics
is less than it used to be probably 15-20 years
ago it had a very significant impact
on the price of wine
I think less so nowadays, rise of social media
and that sort of thing more sort of bloggers and things like that
I think people I think people pay less attention to critic scores than they have done
in the past. So, there will be some effect
but I don't think it's as relevant as it used to be.