Bordeaux and Burgundy Head for Dinosaur Status

"Claret is wine; it is the wine."

"Let there be no doubt about it: Burgundy at its best overtops Claret at its best."

The above quotes, from 80 years ago, show that no matter how greatly things may change, they usually stay very much the same.

The quotes come from the magnificent book Stay Me With Flagons, a memoir of a life in love with wine by Irish lawyer Maurice Healy, first published in 1940, and would seem to pretty much sum up the currently accepted wisdom about wine. Or red wine, at least – Maurice was frequently acerbic about whites, particularly those from Graves.

It goes to show that orthodoxy is as much a part of wine as it is any other field, despite the clear subjectivity of the tasting process. Lafite, Latour, Mouton, Margaux and Haut-Brion are the pinnacles in Bordeaux; DRC, Jayer, Leroy and Rousseau in Burgundy. Whether or not this orthodoxy is correct is another matter – there are those who would argue the merits of Cheval Blanc over Margaux, for example, or Petrus over Haut-Brion, or Mugnier over Rousseau, but the important thing is that the accepted wisdom still prevails.

And these are genuinely great wines, make no mistake about it, but can they remain widely accepted as great if no one really gets the chance to drink them? Is their relevance to the wider wine world already on the wane, as they become increasingly hard to access? They are in genuine danger of becoming dinosaurs – creatures that people see in museums, but have never had a "live" interaction with.

It's entirely possible that these great wines will never be tasted by another generation. So is it time to simply stop talking about them, since they are becoming unattainable to the vast majority of wine lovers?

Thirty years ago, when I was splashing about in the shallows of the wine sea, these wines seemed so much more attainable, even allowing for the relatively lower pay back then. I started my wine career in a small branch of a chain store in west London where, despite our relatively low socio-economic classification, we had wines from DRC and Henri Jayer on the shelf. We stocked the First Growths and their second wines, as well as a quite comprehensive collection of the other classed growths. Krug and Dom rubbed shoulders on the shelves. And all of these wines sold, despite their more-elevated price tags.

We stocked them because they were available to us and it would have been unthinkable not to have them – after all, for generations wine writers and the trade had been telling us all that these were the greatest wines in the world. And maybe that's the problem – the people who tell us what is deemed "good" and what is deemed "great" (and what, by implication is deemed unworthy) tend to be the same people. They are people who have learned what is good from people who learned what is good from… well you can see where this is going.

(There is probably an argument to be made that these wines have somehow become a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way – they are deemed great because those who do our thinking for us believe that they are wines to be deemed great; that they somehow deserve adoration simply because they carry the name they do, regardless of the objective quality; but that is a question for another day.)

Talk to young people these days and they have no great hope of ever tasting these wines, even those who are in formal wine training. Certainly, many candidates for sommelier and WSET qualifications will taste wines from top appellations, but will they taste the "top" wines? Are all Chambertins created equal? Obviously not, or they'd all carry Domaine Leroy's $8000-plus price tag.

Of course, it's not just the professional wine lovers who are missing out. The general wine enthusiast is unlikely to ever get so much as a cork-sniff of La Tache or Screaming Eagle, never mind Romanée-Conti or Leroy Musigny, so what is the point of those wines for future generations? They are only available to the rich or those well-placed within the trade; they are no longer wines for wine lovers.

Even Bordeaux is feeling the pinch, despite its relatively more affordable big names. The CIVB's Allan Sichel said recently that promotional muscle was going into emphasizing Bordeaux's whites, rosés and "more modern" reds – in other words, an admission that "proper" Bordeaux is not only beyond the upcoming generations, it is even seen as being so by the very organization supposed to be promoting it.

The "older" generations, the Boomers and Gen X, will always think of Burgundy and Bordeaux first, presumably because they still have some chance of affording them. However, Millennials and Gen-Zers I've spoken to in the trade have almost given up on ever owning such wines – to many, that's as remote as owning their own home.

They are more concerned with sustainability and craftsmanship than they are with reputation and tend to prefer to try new things than slavishly follow the beaten path. And, to return to the estimable Mr Healy for a moment, they prefer a wine "for its excellence, rather than the mere paper rosette of fame".