An article about Hugh Johnson’s current view on the importance of vintages has stirred a good discussion on Decanter.com. The article by David Higgins is a tease for a Decanter print article due in the January issue.

So if the story, second-hand from an interview with Johnson in the U.K. broadsheet, The Times, is accurate, the erudite author Johnson believes there’s no such thing as a bad vintage anymore. We’ll have to wait for the Decanter article or a look at Johnson’s 2008 Pocket Guide to get his exact point of view.

I think he’s right, however, as far as the average wine drinker is concerned. I don’t think it would be financially wise of him to push the idea too hard, however. Why do we need his 2008 Pocket Guide if vintages are all the same? We could just consult the last edition and all the recommendations should still hold true.

Wine is really two products today. There’s the globalized, branded product that sells for $12 and under. Yellow Tail, Smoking Loon, Red Bicyclette, etc., fall in this category. I agree that in this group a there is little if any vintage variation. Sonoma’s Don Sebastiani, creator of Smoking Loon and a fun group of other wines at affordable prices, sources bulk wines from France, Australia and California, and bottles them under the same label. I’m not sure if he was joking but he recently said that some cases of his wine contain four bottles from one country, four from another and four from the third, all made from the same varietal, but labeled with the separate appellations.

That approach blurs vintage variation as well as source. If it was a weak year in France, then go to Australia to source the wine. The consumer at this level of interest doesn’t care, as long as it tastes good.

But vintages still do matter in high quality, estate-grown or vineyard-designated wines including the great Bordeaux chateaus, elegant Burgundies and Napa Valley Cabernets, to name a few. The years matter to the winemaker, to the sommelier and the connoisseur and they always will.

I don’t invest in wine for resale, so the financial implications of great versus average years doesn’t matter to me. But I do find endlessly fascinating the way that different vintages reveal the true personalities of particular terroirs. It takes vintage variation to reveal what the constants are in a vineyard or small appellation.

If in weak years like 1991 and likewise in strong years like 2000 and 2005 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild still reminds one of a tenor and Chateau Latour of a baritone, as Johnson brilliantly described the two great first growths many years ago in his encyclopedia, then we have the vintage variations to thank for revealing this truth.

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